Fault-Tolerant Embedded-Memory Strategy for Baseband Signal Processing Systems

The growing density of integration and the increasing percentage of system-on-chip area occupied by embedded memories has led to an increase in the expected number of memory faults. The soft memory repair strategy proposed in this paper employs existing forward error correction at the system level and mitigates the impact of memory faults through permutation of high-sensitivity regions. The effectiveness of the proposed repair technique is evaluated on a multi-megabit de-interleaver static random access memory of an ISDB-T digital baseband orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing receiver in 65-nm CMOS. The proposed technique introduces a single multiplexer delay overhead and a configurable area overhead of ⌈M/i⌉ bits, where M is the number of memory rows and i is an integer from 1 to M, inclusive. The repair strategy achieves a measured 0.15 dB gain improvement at 2×10-4 quasi-error-free bit error rate in the presence of stuck-at memory faults for an additive white Gaussian noise channel.