Faraday Introduces Repairable Memory Development System - REMEDE

Self-test and self-repair embedded memory system helps increase chip yield rate

Hsinchu, Taiwan, and Sunnyvale, California -- May 15, 2007 -- Faraday Technology Corporation (TAIEX: 3035) today announced the availability of its repairable memory develop ment system - REMEDE™ (pronounced as “ remedy”). The fully integrated embedded memory system is comprised of Built-in-Self-Repair (BISR) function and the fuse group. Incorporating with Faraday's memory compilers, REMEDE™ can increase overall chip yield, reduce chip cost, raise customers' profit margins and enhance manufacturing test quality. Faraday's REMEDE™ in UMC 0.13um is available now; the one in 90nm will be ready in Q3' 07, and in 65nm will be ready by Q4' 07.

The ratio of the total embedded memory size to overall chip size increases as more features are added into one SoC. The embedded memory becomes the dominate issue of achieving high yield rate, because the conventional testing-only methods can not effectively save the SoC from yield loss. Faraday developed the REMEDE™ technology for SoC designers; it's an advanced methodology to test and repair the embedded memory and therefore can enhance the whole chip yield rate. Users can bring their designs to mass production at much lower cost.

Unlike other approaches which can only deal with one memory type at a time, Faraday's REMEDE™ features high flexibility to support multiple memory types at one time, which maximizes the efficiency of analysis time and saves the chip size. Also, Faraday's REMEDE™ has integrated all required functions, including self-test, repair-analyzer, and self-repair, etc. to eliminate the need for the time-consuming verification process.

Based on the abundant ASIC project experiences and the tight relationship with its foundry partners, Faraday achieved the optimized yield improvement and helped to lower customers' end product cost. Taking one recent case as an example: an international first-tier company has improved their chip yield rate from 79.7% to 86.5% by using Faraday's REMEDE™ repairable memory development system. Faraday's REMEDE™ successfully repairs 98% of the repairable embedded memories, which contributes a lot to the project's success.

“With the introduction of the REMEDE™ solution, we are delivering an optimized embedded memory system tightly integrated with built-in test and repair capabilities to enable our customers to meet their overall yield goals and gain higher profit margins. For SoC designers, this solution overcomes their challenges for adding embedded memory test and repair functionalities into complex SoCs in a timely manner, and helps them to recover yield loss by fixing on-chip memory blocks,” said Hsin Wang, Vice President of IP Business and Technology at Faraday.

Availability and Deliverables of REMEDE™

• Availability: The REMEDE™ in UMC 0.13um is available now; the one in 90nm will be ready soon in Q3' 07, and in 65 nm will be by Q4' 07.
• The complete REMEDE™ package includes:
• Memory instance with redundancy (Memory compiler)
• BISR synthesizable RTL code: Integrated memories, fuse group, BIST, JTAG interface wrapper, and BIRA
• Test bench
• Fuse group (Fuse compiler)
• Documentation

About Faraday Technology Corporation

Faraday Technology Corporation is a leading silicon IP and fabless ASIC vendor. The company's broad silicon IP portfolio includes 32-bit RISC CPUs, DSPs, MPEG4, H.264, PHYs/Controllers for USB 2.0, Ethe rnet, Serial ATA, PCI Express, Cell Library and Memory Compiler. With more than 700 employees and 2006 revenue of US$171 million, Faraday is one of the largest fabless ASIC companies in the Asia-Pacific region, and it also has a significant presence in other world-wide markets. Headquartered in Taiwan , Faraday has service and support offices around the world, including the U.S. , Japan , Europe, and China . For more information, please visit: www.faraday-tech.com