A fast redundancy analysis algorithm in ATE for repairing faulty memories

Testing memory and repairing faults have become increasingly important for improving yield. Redundancy analysis (RA) algorithms have been developed to repair memory faults. However, many RA algorithms have low analysis speeds and occupy memory space within automatic test equipment. A fast RA algorithm using simple calculations is proposed in this letter to minimize both the test and repair time. This analysis uses the grouped addresses in the faulty bitmap. Since the fault groups are independent of each other, the time needed to find solutions can be greatly reduced using these fault groups. Also, the proposed algorithm does not need to store searching trees, thereby minimizing the required memory space. Our experiments show that the proposed RA algorithm is very efficient in terms of speed and memory requirements.