Synergistic Built-In ECC Repair (BIER) Technique for Enhancing Yield and Reliability of Flash Memory

This paper proposes a synergistic built-in ECC repair (BIER) technique. By implementing BIER, a user-defined number of codewords will allocate a portion of the ECC's error correction capability to rectify random manufacturing defects. Consequently, the reliance on spare components can be significantly reduced, as the fault distributions of manufacturing defects are more amenable to ECC repair. We also continuously monitor the correction slack (CS) of codewords during ECC decoding. If the CS falls below a defined threshold, we increase the correction capability for those codewords. The additional BIER circuits can be repurposed for storing the extra check bits. As a result, the yield and reliability of flash memory can be substantially enhanced with fewer spares and reduced ECC overhead.