A Self-Repairable Microprocessor

Abstract

With increasing defect density, microprocessors, especially the embedded caches, will encounter more faults. Adding spare resources to replace defective components is a widely accepted method for yield enhancement. In this work, a repair method using content addressable memory combined with spare bits, as well as a novel fault injection method is proposed. With the proposed fault injection technique, various numbers and types of faults can be flexibly injected into the silicon. A wireless sensor network system using our self-repairable microprocessor (SRP) is developed to prove the effectiveness of the proposed technique.