( DAC 00 Item 29 ) --------------------------------------------- [ 7/13/00 ]
Subject: A Cooley Technology 'Find' -- GeneSys 'BISTDR'
REALLY COOL MEM BIST: At first look, GeneSys is no big shakes. They have
all sorts of cores for BIST. Memory BistCore, Logic BistCore, Boundary
ScanCore. Yawn. Yea, so what? LogicVision's been doing this why before
any ever heard of cheesy little GeneSys. OK, maybe GeneSys is cheaper
because they're the small guys on the block - so? That ain't nothing to
write home about until you stumble into the GeneSys BISTDR. Now THAT caught
my eye! First you've got to think in terms of their Memory BistCore. That
beastie takes in parameters like address size, data width, number of ports,
and even the types of mem test algorithms you want. It's synthesizable and
goes right into your chip to do the right thing on power-up (and other times
that you trigger it) to automatically test your chip's memories. OK. In
steps their BISTDR. BISTDR also goes in your chip, and, on power-up it
tests all your memory and when it finds a problem -- it remaps that bad
address to a working spare address/data space!!! Whoa! When I think of the
percentages of the mondo monster million-gate-plus chips that are memory,
this BISTDR becomes the golden haired boy everyone loves. Of course, you
need to use a memory that's bigger than usual so it has the spare space to
remap to and it's (right now) only a power-up type of mem BIST. (That is,
it doesn't fix runtime alpha particle issues.) I'm told it's most effective
with 256 kbit memories or larger -- but it is fully paramaterized so there's
no upper limit if you have the cycles. http://www.GeneSysTest.com
It was funny. The guy who showed it to me didn't quite get the implications
of how useful such a product would be. It was buried deep in a demo and
just mentioned in passing. When I reacted, the demo guy said it was odd
that the network guys had reacted the same way I did. He said these guys
had yield issues because their big chips had lots of memory and any flaw
could kill them. "Hello! McFly! Is anyone home, McFly!!!"
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