Mentor collaborates with Samsung Foundry to boost product yield and streamline in-fab memory testing

Mentor, a Siemens business, today announced it has collaborated with Samsung Foundry to develop a new reference kit designed to help mutual customers substantially simplify and streamline the testing, diagnosis and repair of embedded memory in advanced systems-on-chip (SoCs) during fabrication.

Incorporating Mentor’s industry-leading Tessent™ MemoryBIST software technology, Samsung Foundry's new design solution kit (SF-DSK) is now available to help fab customers simplify their design-for-test (DFT) flows and improve product yield. The kit features a new, user-friendly interface that connects Samsung’s efuse to Tessent MemoryBIST built-in self-repair (BISR) software, designed for increased automation and simplified implementation.

“Samsung foundry services are used by technology leaders around the globe,” said Sangyun Kim, vice president of the Design Technology Team at Samsung Electronics. “By providing the Tessent MemoryBIST BISR tool in the new design solution kit, our customers can take advantage of fully integrated memory BIST and repair functionalities, as well as minimalize design overhead. These advanced features allow our customers to better focus on their most critical tasks.”

Before the introduction of Samsung Foundry’s design solution kit, customers had to develop their own interface logic using a very general efuse interface template. This required them to study the Samsung efuse operation, and then manually customize the interface to leverage advanced Tessent MemoryBIST features such as compression of repair data and incremental repair. Now customers can implement repair with Tessent MemoryBIST and Samsung efuse much more quickly.

Among the sophisticated Tessent MemoryBIST BISR features now available in the kit are:

• Advanced compression,
• Incremental repairs such as those needed for testing in different temperature environments,
• Automatic power-up transfer functionality that stores instructions during boot-up and execute afterwards, and
• Fast read/write performance – two cycles with buffer.

“Mentor is pleased to collaborate with Samsung as we continue to deliver advanced technologies that help our shared customers deliver innovative and compelling ICs to market more quickly,” said Brady Benware, vice president and general manager for the Tessent product family at Mentor. “We look forward to the successful end-products that our customers can soon develop with this new design solution kit.”