LogicVision Announces Industry's Most Comprehensive On-Chip eDRAM Test and Repair Solution.

SAN JOSE, Calif., Oct. 16 /PRNewswire/ -- LogicVision, Inc. , a leading provider of test and yield learning capabilities for the semiconductor industry, today announced that its ETMemory(TM) product line now fully supports built-in-self-test and built-in self-repair of embedded DRAMs (eDRAMs). ETMemory is widely used for testing embedded SRAMs at leading semiconductor and system companies worldwide. Building on that success, LogicVision has now added the critical requirements for test and self-repair of eDRAMs. LogicVision will demonstrate ETMemory for eDRAM at the 2007 International Test Conference, Oct 23-25, in Santa Clara, CA.

As silicon process technologies for eDRAMs have become more economical, the application of eDRAMs in SoCs, especially in consumer type applications, is growing rapidly. While embedding large blocks of DRAM into SoCs provides many cost and performance advantages, it also creates new test and yield challenges due to the higher circuit densities of eDRAMs over more traditional embedded SRAMS. This trend in turn is driving the need for advanced on-chip test and repair capabilities to enable cost-effective approaches for meeting quality and yield requirements.

Comprehensive support for eDRAM test and repair

ETMemory represents the industry's only comprehensive eDRAM test and repair solution. It uniquely provides the following key capabilities:

* DRAM operation support - supports all eDRAM communication requirements such as address interleaving, address multiplexing and auto refresh.

* Programmable test algorithms - support for both hard and soft programmability allowing user defined algorithms to be either integrated into embedded test controllers at design time or downloaded into embedded test controllers at test time. Hard programmability achieves high quality levels with low area overhead, while soft programmability provides the ability to handle unforeseen defect mechanisms during production, enabling quality without costly re-spins.

* Built-In Self Repair (BISR) - on-chip capabilities necessary to test, analyze and permanently repair eDRAMs containing redundancy including support for architectures using both spare rows and spare columns. The solution includes on-chip global fuse management, removing the need for external fuse data storage and greatly simplifying the manufacturing test flow.