Title
An SRAM Design-for-Diagnosis Solution Based on Write Driver Voltage Sensing
Abstract
Diagnosis is becoming a major concern with the rapid development of semiconductor memories. It provides information about the location of manufacturing defects in the memory, and its effectiveness allows a fast yield ramp up. Most of existing diagnosis methods uses a fault dictionary to provide detailed information on fault localization. However, these solutions are most of the time unable to distinguish between all faults, and more importantly often fail to identify the actual faulty block of the memory. Identifying which block of a memory (core-cell array, write drivers, address decoders, pre-charge circuits, etc …) is defective allows to saving considerable amount of time during the ramp up phase.In this paper, we propose a very low cost Design-for-Diagnosis (DfD) solution for identifying faulty write drivers. It consists in verifying logic and analog conditions that guarantee the fault-free behavior of the write driver. The proposed solution allows a fast diagnosis (only three consecutive write operations are needed to fully diagnose the write driver) and induces a low area overhead (about 0.5% for a 512x512 SRAM). Beside diagnosis, an additional interest of such a solution is its usefulness during a post-silicon characterization process, where it can be used to extract the main features of the write drivers (logic and analog levels on bit lines).
Year
DOI
Venue
2008
10.1109/VTS.2008.17
VTS
Keywords
Field
DocType
SRAM chips,SRAM design-for-diagnosis solution,write driver voltage sensing,SRAM,design-for-diagnosis,diagnosis,write driver
System on a chip,Bit line,Design for diagnosis,Computer science,Voltage,Real-time computing,Electronic engineering,Static random-access memory,Memory management,Electronic circuit,Embedded system,Cellular array
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
1093-0167
0-7695-3123-7
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
8
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Alexandre Ney1182.99
P. Girard247841.91
S. Pravossoudovitch368954.12
A. Virazel416923.25
M. Bastian5253.82
V. Gouin661.21