A physical design tool for built-in self-repairable RAMs

In this paper, we present the description and evaluation of a novel physical design tool, BISRAMGEN, that can generate reconfigurable and fault-tolerant RAM modules. This tool designs a redundant RAM array with accompanying built-in self-test (BIST) and built-in self-repair (BISR) logic that can switch out faulty rows and switch in spare rows. Built-in self-repair causes significant improvement in reliability, production yield, and manufacturing cost of ASICs and microprocessors with embedded RAMs.