Utilizing faulty cores

Hard errors may be caused during the semiconductor manufacturing process, or in the field due to wearout. The incidence of such defects is increasing with the increasing complexity of lithography and reducing feature sizes. The naive solution to this problem is to discard or disable the faulty chip, but this strategy is very suboptimal. In many cases, there is scope for extracting something of value from a faulty chip. This has spurred research into recovering chips that have failed due to hard errors. This is a survey of the contributions made in this very relevant area of research, with a brief look at recent trends in detecting and diagnosing faults. Copyright © 2011 by the IETE.