Simulated annealing algorithm for the fault covering of redundant RAMs

The authors present a fast simulated annealing algorithm for the problem of fault covering of redundant RAMs. The authors propose a simple representation of repair solutions from which they derive a natural definition of moves and neighboring solutions. The algorithm has been implemented and tested on some benchmark problems. The results show that the method not only produces very good quality solutions, but also runs very fast. In fact, for all the repairable chips, the simulated annealing algorithm finds a repair solution within a second for various problem sizes