• ETRI Journal
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• v.35 no.5
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• pp.808-818
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• 2013

Programmable memory built-in self-test (PMBIST) is an attractive approach for testing embedded memory. However, the main difficulties of the previous works are the large area overhead and low flexibility. To overcome these problems, a new flexible PMBIST (FPMBIST) architecture that can test both single-port memory and dual-port memory using various test algorithms is proposed. In the FPMBIST, a new instruction set is developed to minimize the FPMBIST area overhead and to maximize the flexibility. In addition, FPMBIST includes a diagnostic scheme that can improve the yield by supporting three types of diagnostic methods for repair and diagnosis. The experiment results show that the proposed FPMBIST has small area overhead despite the fact that it supports various test algorithms, thus having high flexibility.

• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.8 no.5
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• pp.590-597
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• 2002

Currently, with the increasing demand for combining cellular phone and PDA, various kinds of PDA-phones are being developed. A typical PDA-phone consists of a CDMA processor and a PDA processor. Generally, a UART serial communication port is used for inter-processor communication. However, the CDMA standard will need more data bandwidth over 2Mbps with the emergence of IMT-2000. The bandwidth requirement is beyond the capability of UART. In this paper, several inter-processor communication mechanisms are analyzed and especially Dual Port Memory and USB were chosen as the candidates for the new communication mechanism. A prototype PDA-phone board has been implemented for experiment. The experimental result shows that Dual Port Memory is better than USB in cost performance.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.49 no.8
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• pp.55-62
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• 2012

The development of memory design and process technology enabled the production of high density memory. As the weight of embedded memory within aggregate Systems-On-Chips(SoC) gradually increases to 80-90% of the number of total transistors, the importance of testing embedded dual-port memories in SoC increases. This paper proposes a new micro-code based programmable memory Built-In Self-Test(PMBIST) architecture for dual-port memories that support test various test algorithms. In addition, various test algorithms including March based algorithms and dual-port memory test algorithms are efficiently programmed through the proposed algorithm instruction set. This PMBIST has an optimized hardware overhead, since test algorithm can be implemented with the minimum bits by the optimized algorithm instructions.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.44 no.2
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• pp.72-85
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• 2007

The development of memory design and process technology enabled the production of high density memory. However, this increased the complexity of the memory making memory testing more complicated, and as a result, it brought about an increase in memory testing costs. Effective memory test algorithm must detect various types of defects within a short testing time, and especially in the case of port memory test algorithm, it must be able to detect single port memory defects, and all the defects in the dual port memory. The March A2PF algorithm proposed in this paper is an effective test algorithm that detects all types of defects relating to the duel port and single port memory through the short 18N test pattern.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.42 no.2 s.332
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• pp.57-64
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• 2005

In this paper, we develop the common CAD tool that creates the automatically BIST IP by user settings for the convenient test of embedded memory. Previous tools have defect that when memory model is changed, BIST IP must re-designed depending on memory model because existing tools is limited the widely used algorithms. We develop the tool that is created automatic BIST IP. It applies the algorithm according to the memory model which user requests We usually use the multi-port asynchronous SRAM needless to refresh as the embedded memory. However, This work researches on the dual-port SRAM.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.40 no.1
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• pp.72-79
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• 2003

Due to the improvements in circuit design technique and manufacturing technique, complexity of a circuit is growing along with the demand for memories with large capacities. Likewise, as a memory capacity gets larger, testing gets harder and testing cost increases, and testing process in chip development gets larger as well. Therefore, a research on an effective test algorithm to improve the chip yield rate in a short time period is becoming an important task. This paper proposes an effective, March C-algorithm based, test algorithm that can also be applied to a dual-port memory since it considers all the fault types, which can be occurred in a single-port as well as in a dual-port memory, without increasing the test length.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.32 no.1
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• pp.84-92
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• 2010

This paper proposes the semaphore authority management (SAM) controller to optimize the dual-port SDRAM (DPSDRAM) in the mobile multimedia systems. Recently, the DPSDRAM with a shared bank enabling the exchange of data between two processors at high speed has been developed for mobile multimedia systems based on dual-processors. However, the latency of DPSDRAM caused by the semaphore for preventing the access contention at the shared bank slows down the data transfer rate and reduces the memory bandwidth. The methodology of SAM increases the data transfer rate by minimizing the semaphore latency. The SAM prevents the latency of reading the semaphore register of DPSDRAM, and reduces the latency of waiting for the authority of the shared bank to be changed. It also reduces the number of authority requests and the number of times authority changes. The experimental results using a 1 Gb DPSDRAM (OneDRAM) with the SAM controllers at 66 MHz show 1.6 times improvement of the data transfer rate between two processors compared with the traditional controller. In addition, the SAM shows bandwidth enhancement of up to 38% for port A and 31% for port B compared with the traditional controller.

• The Journal of Korea Institute of Information, Electronics, and Communication Technology
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.310-318
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• 2015

In this paper, dual-port eFuse OTP (one-time programmable) memory cells with smaller cell sizes are used, a single VREF (reference voltage) is used in the designed eFuse OTP IP (intellectual property), and a BL (bit-line) sensing circuit using a S/A (sense amplifier) based D F/F is proposed. With this proposed sensing technique, the read current can be reduced to 3.887mA from 6.399mA. In addition, the sensing resistances of a programmed eFuse cell in the program-verify-read and read mode are also reduced to $9k{\Omega}$ and $5k{\Omega}$ due to the analog sensing. The layout size of the designed 32-bit eFuse OTP memory is $187.845{\mu}m{\times}113.180{\mu}m$ ($=0.0213{\mu}m2$), which is confirmed to be a small-area implementation.

• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.14 no.5
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• pp.542-546
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• 2008

Recently dual-port SDRAM (DPSDRAM) architecture tailored for dual-processor based mobile embedded systems has been announced where a single memory chip plays the role of the local memories and the shared memory for both processors. In order to maintain memory consistency from simultaneous accesses of both ports, every access to the shared memory should be protected by a synchronization mechanism, which can result in substantial access latency. We propose two optimization techniques by exploiting the communication patterns of target applications: lock-priority scheme and static-copy scheme. Further, by dividing the shared bank into multiple blocks, we allow simultaneous accesses to different blocks thus achieve considerable performance gain. Experiments on a virtual prototyping system show a promising result - we could achieve about 20-50% performance gain compared to the base DPSDRAM architecture.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.39 no.3
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• pp.20-33
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• 2002

As dual port RAMs are widely used in the various applications, the need for an efficient algorithm to diagnose faults in dual port RAMs is increased. In this paper we propose an efficient algorithm that can diagnose all kinds of faults in dual port RAMs. In addition, the new algorithm can distinguish various fault models and locate the position related to each fault. Using the new algorithm, fault diagnosis for dual port RAMs can be performed efficiently and the performance evaluation with previous approaches proves the efficiency of the new algorithm.