Reducing the failure bitmap size with a partial solution search tree for the low cost automatic test equipment (ATE)

In general, the external automatic test equipment (ATE) is used to progress a redundancy analysis (RA) process in industrial semiconductor memories. However, many researches have pointed out that a high price of the external ATE can be a huge burden on testing costs. This paper presents a new concept which reduces the failure bitmap size in the external ATE without an any extra hardware overhead. Despite the reduction of the failure bitmap size, converting some parts of the faulty information to a partial solution search tree prevents unwanted yield drops.