Interactive Educational Tool for Memory Testing

Memories are one of the most important components in digital systems like SoCs. The high density of their cell array makes memories extremely vulnerable to physical defects. Hence, memory testing and Design-for-Test became one of the crucial tasks in the design of complex and heterogeneous SoCs. Politecnico di Torino and the Institute of Informatics have a wide experience in the field of RAM testing (i.e., automatic march test generation, fault simulators, memory BIST generators etc.). This work is a tentative to put the joint experience of our research groups in developing an interactive educational tool for the students that should introduce standard and well-known methods of memory testing based on BIST. The MemBIST Java Applet and the March Test Generator were two individual tools designed and implemented at the two mentioned institutions. They were merged into one tool in order to facilitate its usage also by the professionals.