Improved Representatives for Judging Unrepairability and Deciding Economic Repair Solutions of Memories

This paper introduces a novel method of identifying better representatives of faulty cells in a memory map to help judge unrepairability and provide economical repair solutions. These representatives, called leading elements (LE), are classified into four primary types based on their characteristics. The proposed method primarily assigns the faulty cells without row or column complements as LE, making them more useful in judging unrepairability and providing economical repair solutions. Some initially identified LE are further replaced with suitable faulty cells for being LE. Experiments on many example maps show the distribution of LE in various sizes of memories with distinct numbers of faulty cells. Compared to the previous work, the improved procedure can identify 7.3% more LE, with only 1.5% additional run time.