A low-cost pipelined BIST scheme for homogeneous RAMs in multicore chips

Multicore system-on-chip (SOC) design is widely used for current high-performance applications. Multicore SOCs typically include a large amount of homogeneous memory cores (i.e., memory cores have the same size and configuration). This paper proposes a pipelined built-in self-test (PBIST) scheme for homogeneous memory cores in multicore SOCs. A PBIST circuit can be shared by clustered multiple homogeneous memories. This drastically reduces the hardware overhead of the PBIST circuit. A systematic procedure for converting a march test into a pipelined march test is also proposed. Experimental results show that the area overhead of a pipelined BIST for eight homogeneous 1k×128-bit memories is only about 0.71%.