SETBIST: An Soft-Error Tolerant Built-In Self-Test Scheme for Random Access Memories

Variability in transistor performance will continue to increase with the scaling of technology. Transistors are more and more unreliable. Also, the noise-tolerant capability of circuits is less and less robust. To avoid the loss of yield and fault coverage, the design-for-testability circuit must be designed to be noise-tolerant. This paper presents a soft-error tolerant built-in self-test (SETBIST) design for random access memories (RAMs). Some soft-error-mitigation (SEM) techniques are proposed to enhance the soft-error immunity of the instruction register, March operation generator, address generator, and data background generator. Experimental results show that the area overhead of the SETBIST is only about 1.1% for an 8K x 64-bit SRAM. Analysis results show that the SETBIST can effectively tolerate soft errors. We also use FPGA demonstration board to verify the SETBIST scheme.