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Institute for Computing Systems Architecture

Testing Times - Pragmatic Approaches to Testing DRAM Memories

Rob Payne
Snr ASIC Design Engineer
MemQuest Ltd

3:30pm - 4:30pm, Thursday 15 March 2001

Room 2511, James Clerk Maxwell Building
King's Buildings, Mayfield Road
Edinburgh EH9 3JZ.

Testing DRAMs to find defects is somewhat akin to the childhood game "BattleShips", though on a vastly different scale; the targets can hide on a playing board consisting of several hundred millions of squares. In addition, if the target is not hit with the right combination of voltage and temperature, or in the correct sequence with other squares, then the target maybe missed. Furthermore, given the cost of the test hardware required to play the game, if you don't find all the targets within a short test time then you lose the game regardless.

The talk will describe how this became of critical importance to the development of the memory repair technology developed at the speaker's former company, Memory Corporation, and how the optimal solution involved a range of household items available on the average office desk.

SHOWING WITH:

The main feature presentation will be accompanied by a short discussion of Flash Storage Media. Portable devices such as PDAs, Digitial Cameras, MP3 Players, Mobile Telephones are requiring increasing amounts of non-volatile memory, but the management of flash memory is far from a simple task. MemQuest, is a new Edinburgh-based Technology Start-Up, that is developing the next generation of high performance Flash Storage Cards.


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