Logic Self Repair Based on Regular Building Blocks

The scalability of CMOS technology is apparently approaching physical limits. In particular, technology forecasts expect higher rates of permanent and transient faults, which make fault tolerant design and, eventually, built-in self repair (BISR) capabilities a necessity. While BISR works reasonably in regular structures such as memory blocks, BISR for random logic is by far an unsolved problem. This paper introduces a novel systematic approach towards logic BISR and gives some indications for cost and limitations.