News | May 16, 2007

Faraday Introduces Repairable Memory Development System - REMEDE

Sunnyvale, CA - Faraday Technology Corporation recently announced the availability of its repairable memory develop ment system - REMEDE (pronounced as "remedy"). The fully integrated embedded memory system is comprised of Built-in-Self-Repair (BISR) function and the fuse group. Incorporating with Faraday's memory compilers, REMEDE can increase overall chip yield, reduce chip cost, raise customers' profit margins and enhance manufacturing test quality. Faraday's REMEDE in UMC 0.13um is available now; the one in 90nm will be ready in Q3' 07, and in 65nm will be ready by Q4' 07.

The ratio of the total embedded memory size to overall chip size increases as more features are added into one SoC. The embedded memory becomes the dominate issue of achieving high yield rate, because the conventional testing-only methods can not effectively save the SoC from yield loss. Faraday developed the REMEDE technology for SoC designers; it's an advanced methodology to test and repair the embedded memory and therefore can enhance the whole chip yield rate. Users can bring their designs to mass production at much lower cost.

Unlike other approaches which can only deal with one memory type at a time, Faraday's REMEDE features high flexibility to support multiple memory types at one time, which maximizes the efficiency of analysis time and saves the chip size. Also, Faraday's REMEDE has integrated all required functions, including self-test, repair-analyzer, and self-repair, etc. to eliminate the need for the time-consuming verification process.

Based on the abundant ASIC project experiences and the tight relationship with its foundry partners, Faraday achieved the optimized yield improvement and helped to lower customers' end product cost. Taking one recent case as an example: an international first-tier company has improved their chip yield rate from 79.7% to 86.5% by using Faraday's REMEDE repairable memory development system. Faraday's REMEDE successfully repairs 98% of the repairable embedded memories, which contributes a lot to the project's success.

"With the introduction of the REMEDE solution, we are delivering an optimized embedded memory system tightly integrated with built-in test and repair capabilities to enable our customers to meet their overall yield goals and gain higher profit margins. For SoC designers, this solution overcomes their challenges for adding embedded memory test and repair functionalities into complex SoCs in a timely manner, and helps them to recover yield loss by fixing on-chip memory blocks," said Hsin Wang, Vice President of IP Business and Technology at Faraday.

SOURCE: Faraday Technology Corporation