New results on fault covering in RRAMs

The authors present new results for the fault covering problem and propose an algorithm that integrates these new results. They present a fast greedy algorithm for constructing repair solutions and establish a simple criterion under which they can guarantee that the algorithm will find a repair solution. This, in turn, leads to a simple test for repairability. The authors present a new test for detecting irreparable chips. It is shown that this test provides an improved bound on the number of faults for detecting irreparability. The new tests presented are simpler than previous tests and they run in linear time. The authors also propose an algorithm that integrates these new tests for the fault covering problem. The integrated algorithm is very fast and very effective. Extensive testing using a large sample of problems with the generalized negative binomial fault distribution as well as problems with random fault distribution shows that the integrated algorithm is able to detect virtually all instances of reparability and irreparability