摘要 |
A method of and an apparatus for differentiating between hard and soft failures of semiconductor memory cells for the purpose of error logging only hard failures. A spare bit position is appended to each addressable location within the semiconductor memory. The spare bit position is set, if the corresponding addressable location is observed to contain a single bit error during regeneration. The spare bit position is cleared, if the corresponding addressable location is observed not to contain a single bit error during regeneration. An error log entry is made for normal read access to an addressable location observed to contain a single bit error only if the spare bit is set indicating that a single bit error was present during regeneration of that addressable location. |