Stress test for disturb faults in non-volatile memories

Non-volatile memories are susceptible to special type of faults known as program disturb faults. Testing for such faults requires the application of stress tests which have long application time to distinguish faulty cells from non-faulty cells. In this paper we present a new sensing scheme that can be used with stress tests to allow for efficient detection of faulty cells based on the notion of margin reads. We demonstrate the efficiency of the margin-read approach for distinguishing between faulty and fault-free cells using electrical simulations.