Increasing Yield Using Partially-Programmable Circuits

This paper proposes to use a new circuit model called Partially-Programmable Circuits (PPCs) to increase the yield with very small overhead. PPCs are obtained from conventional logic circuits by replacing their sub-circuits with LUTs. If a connection in an PPC becomes redundant by changing the functionality of some LUTs, the connection is considered to be robust to defects because even if there are some defects at the connection, the circuit works properly by changing the functionality of some LUTs appropriately. To increase the number of such robust connections, we add some redundant connections to LUTs beforehand. We find such redundant connection by using functional flexibility represented by SPFDs and/or CSPFs. In other words, our proposed approach can increase the yield by only adding some redundant connections. From the result of our preliminary experiments, we consider our approach is promising.