A partial memory protection scheme for higher effective yield of embedded memory for video data

With the emerging SoC era the on-chip embedded memory will occupy most of the silicon real estate. As the technology proceeds into very deep submicron, the yield of SoCs will drop sharply mainly because of the on-chip memory failure. Therefore, the embedded memory is becoming the crucial part for achieving higher chip yield. In this paper, we propose an error-resilient video data memory system architecture design. The proposed scheme employs partial memory protection scheme rather than traditional whole memory protection. Our approach is based on the fact that video data memory need not to be error-free because multimedia data has built-in redundancies by their own nature and allows partial data loss without serious quality degradation. With our approach we can achieve 100% data memory yield while incurring a small power overhead. We demonstrate the efficiency of our approach with H.264 application up to 2.0% memory bit error.