CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
11 April 2005
Product News
Magma's Physically Aware Blast DFT Memory BIST Solution Chosen by ARM for Improving Yield through the ARM Memory Repair Capability
Magma® Design Automation Inc. announced that ARM has chosen Magma's Memory BIST (built-in self-test) solution within Blast DFTT for the ARM® Artisan® memory products. Magma's Memory BIST features provide an automated BIST solution for system-on-chip (SoC) designs that include hundreds of embedded memories. The Artisan memory generators with Flex-RepairT Redundancy can benefit from Magma's built-in repair analysis allowing mutual customers a seamless path to redundant memory-based yield enhancement. ARM and Magma have collaborated on the validation using several widely-used, synthesizable ARM processors.
The recently announced Magma Blast DFT consists of automatically generated hardware that is synthesized on-the-fly and merged into the host design. The at-speed test mechanism supports industry standard test algorithms as well as new algorithms specifically designed to target subtle defect mechanisms found in 90-nanometer memories. The built-in repair analysis supports multiple dimensions of redundancy (row and column) and can be used for soft, hard or composite repair strategies. Diagnostic modes allow root-cause failure analysis including full failure bit-map generation for trend analysis and yield improvement.
"Design for test is changing rapidly with nanometer processes. Now, more than ever, we need very efficient test structures that are automatically inserted in the design without any disruption to the implementation process," said Rob Aitken, senior architect, Physical IP, ARM. "Not only is the detection of defects important to our mutual customers, but memory repair is a necessity as well for achieving optimum yields on large amounts of embedded memory."
"Today, many designs are using several mega-bytes of embedded storage configured in a few hundred memory blocks," said Kam Kittrell, general manager of Magma's Logic Design Business Unit. "Faults in these memory blocks greatly reduce the yield of the entire SoC. Working with a world-class partner like ARM, we are able to offer a robust solution to memory testing and repair for leading-edge designers with Blast DFT, thereby ensuring both quality and yield."
Blast DFT is an integrated design-for-test solution in Magma's RTL-to-GDSII flow. It supports a comprehensive set of DFT features including Full Scan, Boundary Scan, TAP controller, Memory BIST and Logic BIST. The infrastructure for this solution generates test logic in RTL for future use in synthesis process, and automatically generates test benches to ease the verification of the DFT-inserted design. One of the products from Magma's next-generation "Cobra" platform development, Blast DFT's enhanced memory BIST architecture, offers ease-of-use and fast turn-around-time.
Availability and Demonstration
Blast DFT is available now from Magma Design Automation. This enhanced DFT technology from Magma and ARM will be demonstrated using the ARM926EJ-S synthesizable core at the Design Automation Conference (DAC) in Anaheim, CA, June 13-16, 2005 at Magma's booth #2250.
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