Analysis and test procedures for NOR flash memory defects

Widespread use of non-volatile memories, especially flash memories, in diverse applications such as in mobile computing and system-on-chip is becoming a common place. As a result, testing them for faults and reliability is drawing considerable interest of designers and researchers. One of the most predominant failure modes for which these memories must be tested is called disturb faults. In this paper, we first analyze different defects that are responsible for disturb faults using a 2-dimension device simulator. We determine the impact of various defects on cell performance and develop a methodology based on channel erase technique to detect these defects. Our tests are efficient and can be converted to march tests prevalently used to test memories. We also propose a very low cost design-for-testability approach that can be used to apply the test technique developed in this paper. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.