FAME: Fault Address Memory Structure for Repair Time Reduction

Memory repair with redundancy analysis (RA) is widely used to improve memory yield. However, as the growth of the number of memory cells has increased, it has caused the increase in the number of faulty cells. For this reason, the repair time of memory has drastically increased. To address the problem, fault address memory structure for repair time reduction (FAME) is proposed in this paper. Although various RA studies have been proposed to reduce the fault analysis time, the read time of fault information from fault bitmap in automatic test equipment has not been considered. As FAME considers the read time of fault information, the repair time can be highly reduced due to the proposed fault address memory structure. Furthermore, FAME can be applied with all conventional RA studies. Experimental results demonstrate that the repair time is highly reduced regardless of the coordinated RA methods.