Test and diagnosis of word-oriented multiport memories

Abstract

Conventionally, the test of multiport memories is considered difficult because of the complex behavior of the faulty memories and the large number of inter-port faults. This paper presents an efficient approach for testing and diagnosing multiport RAMs. Our approach takes advantage of the higher access bandwidth due to the increased number of read/write ports, which also provides higher observability and controllability that effectively reduces the test time. Our key idea is that a sequence of March operations for any memory cell can be folded and executed within a single access cycle. We have also developed an efficient test algorithm for port-specific faults as well as traditional cell faults. The port-specific faults include the stuck-open, address decoder, and inter-port faults, for both bit-oriented and word-oriented RAMs. Experimental results for our folding scheme show that the test time reduction is about 28% for a commercial 8 KB embedded SRAM. An efficient diagnostic algorithm is also proposed for the port-specific faults and traditional cell faults.