TECHNIQUE FOR RECONFIGURING A HIGH DENSITY MEMORY

摘要

A flexible technique for improving yield of manufacturing of high density of memory devices, such as flash EEPROM, involves reconfiguring an integrated memory array having a plurality of sectors (10) selected by an address decoder (11, 13) in response to an N bit field in an address (17). If defective sectors are detected in the array, it is partitioned to disable defective sectors by configuring a sector decoder (12) to prevent access to the defective sectors while maintaining sequential addressing remaining in the array. The step of partitioning includes configuring the sector decoder (12) to replace a defective sector in one half of the array by another sector in the other half of the array having N-m of the address bits in common with the defective sector when m is between 1 and N-1.