A voltage island is defined as a core or design region that is powered by a separate supply voltage. Each island can then be powered up or down based on operational need resulting in an overall power saving. The on-chip repair process involves reconfiguring defective memories to swap out defective memory elements with spares. The reconfiguration data is stored next to each defective memory on power-up by the self-repair capabilities.
The new power-aware solution supports any number of voltage islands and has been optimized to reduce the area overhead needed for the self-repair infrastructure as well as the time required to reconfigure defective memories.
“We are seeing a rapid increase in the use of power management techniques throughout our customer base.” said Stephen Pateras, vice-president of marketing at LogicVision. “Our new power-aware memory self-repair solution is the result of an on-going effort to ensure our BIST solutions fully support evolving low-power design practices.”
The power-aware memory self-repair capability will be available in June 2009 and is an option to LogicVision’s ETMemory product.
LogicVision is a US-based provider of semiconductor built-in-self-test (BIST) and diagnostic solutions.
