A channel-sharable built-in self-test scheme for multi-channel DRAMs

Various multi-channel dynamic random access memories (MC-DRAMs) have been proposed for the demand of high bandwidth. In this paper, we propose a channel-sharable built-in self-test (BIST) scheme for MC-DRAMs. The BIST can apply test patterns and evaluate test responses for multiple channels simultaneously regardless of the difference of the read/write latency among the channels. Therefore, the proposed BIST can reduce the test time. In our simulation cases show that the proposed BIST scheme can achieve about 11% test time reduction in comparison with an existing conventional shared BIST scheme for a two-channel 1G-bit DRAM by consuming about 0.003% additional area cost.