A low-cost built-in self-test scheme for an array of memories

Modern processor and computation-intensive chips typically use the design style of multi-core chip architecture with identical logic and memory cores. Although memory built-in self-test (BIST) is a mature technique for testing embedded memories, testing multiple small memories using small area cost is still a challenge. This paper proposes a low area-cost BIST scheme for an array of memories and interconnections between memory cores and logic cores. To reduce the area cost without incurring long testing time, the BIST scheme tests multiple identical memories in a pipeline and each memory with a serial test interface. Experimental results show that the proposed BIST scheme has small area cost. For example, the proposed BIST scheme for 16 1024×64-bit RAMs only needs about 0.89% hardware overhead.