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With technological advancements, the density and capacity of memory are rapidly increasing. As the number of memory cells increases, the difficulty of fault analysis and the number of faults also increase. Hence, the yield and test cost of memory have become essential issues in memory manufacturing. Many manufacturers have used redundancy analysis (RA) to improve the memory yield and decrease the test cost. However, most conventional RA methods require a lengthy analysis time to find a repair solution, and it is difficult to obtain an optimal repair rate with conventional RA algorithms. Although several algorithms using various spare structures to achieve performance improvement have been proposed, those improvements have not been groundbreaking. In this paper, a new multi-bank optimized redundancy analysis (MORA) algorithm is proposed. It achieves a very high repair rate and a drastic reduction in the analysis time compared with conventional RA algorithms using various spare structures. During testing, the proposed algorithm stores the faulty cell information efficiently. Therefore, the analysis time can be shortened through the pre-solution process of the repair analysis using the proposed fault storage spaces. Additionally, the proposed spare structures are used to increase the repair rate. The experimental results reveal that the proposed algorithm can achieve a very high repair rate at a faster speed than conventional RA algorithms.

Three-dimensional integrated circuits (3D ICs) utilizing through-silicon via (TSV) technology have many advantages over 2D ICs including high bandwidth, high density, and low power consumption. However, TSV, which is a key feature of 3D ICs, has not only problems due to defects in the manufacturing process, but also potential problems due to aging. Various solutions have been proposed to address each of these issues, but no one solution has been proposed considering both. In practice, to improve the overall reliability of the TSV, the two problems should be solved together, not separately. In this paper, a new TSV architecture is proposed to cope with both issues. The proposed TSV architecture uses redundant TSVs (RTSVs) to repair faulty TSVs due to manufacturing defects and uses unused RTSVs in this way to solve the aging-related problems. Experimental results show that the proposed architecture achieves similar repair rate with less than 1% difference in less than 6 clustered faults using smaller hardware overhead, and also shows that unused RTSVs are available with a 98.5% high probability, resulting in a 1.5 times improvement in lifetime.

Background Mobile phones emit radiofrequency (RF) electromagnetic waves (EMWs), a low-level RF that can be absorbed by the human body and exert potential adverse effects on the brain, heart, endocrine system, and reproductive function. Owing to the novel findings of numerous studies published since 2012 regarding the effect of mobile phone use on sperm quality, we conducted a systematic review and updated meta-analysis to determine whether the exposure to RF-EMWs affects human sperm quality. Methods This study was conducted in accordance with the PRISMA guidelines. The outcome measures depicting sperm quality were motility, viability, and concentration, which are the most frequently used parameters in clinical settings to assess fertility. Results We evaluated 18 studies that included 4280 samples. Exposure to mobile phones is associated with reduced sperm motility, viability, and concentration. The decrease in sperm quality after RF-EMW exposure was not significant, even when the mobile phone usage increased. This finding was consistent across experimental in vitro and observational in vivo studies. Discussion Accumulated data from in vivo studies show that mobile phone usage is harmful to sperm quality. Additional studies are needed to determine the effect of the exposure to EMWs from new mobile phone models used in the present digital environment.

As the probability of fault occurrence increases with the advance of memory density and capacity, redundancy analysis (RA) is widely used for memory yield. However, the conventional RAs progress unnecessary solution search stages since they are applied per memory bank. It results in increase of the repair time. In this paper, redundancy analysis optimization with clustered known solutions (ROCK) is proposed for high speed repair. It progresses repair solution search considering multiple memory banks. During the repair solution search, RA using ROCK finds duplicated solution search stages based on a fault grouping method. After then, RA using ROCK enrolls the duplicated solution search stages as library and utilizes the library instead of progressing the duplicated solution search stages. It can highly reduce the repair time without any repair rate degradation.

Since the probability of fault occurrence on memory has increased with the advance of memory density and capacity, memory repairs in wafer-level and package-level are widely used with redundancy analysis (RA) to improve memory yield. However, as the costs for memory repair also have increased in proportion to the memory density and capacity, the repair costs have occupied a significant portion of the total costs. To address the problem, one-time memory repair with wafer-level early repair analysis (W-ERA) for cost reduction is proposed in this paper. The proposed W-ERA facilitates that all unrepairable memories are classified rapidly without searching memory repair solutions in wafer-level and repairable memory faults occurred in wafer-level are repaired in package-level with additional faults occurred in package-level simultaneously. It means, as the costs of memory repair can be highly reduced since memory repair is skipped in wafer-level, the total costs also can be highly reduced. In addition, memory redundancies can be efficiently used for memory repair in package-level and it results a high repair rate achievement.

With the development of memory density and capacity, a redundancy analysis (RA) is widely used to improve memory yield. However, as the probability of fault occurrence on memory increases, repair rates of conventional RAs with a simple spare structure have been not enough to achieve a high memory yield. In this paper, redundancy analysis based on fault distribution (RAFD) for memory with complex spares is proposed to address the problem. It can obtain much higher repair rate than using conventional RAs with a simple spare structure by using complex spares. Also, although use of complex spares can cause analysis time increase but, RAFD solves the problem with the sequential spare allocations through consideration of fault distribution.

With the development of memory manufacturing technology, the density of memory die has been increased and more data can be stored in a small area than before. However, due to the complexity of the manufacturing process, faults in memory have increased. And it leads to poor yield and quality of memory. To improve yield and quality of the memory, the importance of memory test and repair is growing to maintain memory productivity. This paper presents solutions for test and repair in pre-bond. In the pre-bond, proposed method makes a new 3D stacked memory by using unrepairable memory dice which cannot be repaired with existing spare memories. Discard the bank with the largest number of faults in the unrepairable memory die and repair the remaining banks. The memory dice and a spare layer which made of the known good die or unrepairable memory die are stacked to create a 3D memory. A bank of the spare layer is mapped to discarded bank of unrepairable memory die to operate as one normal working memory die. The proposed method can lead to high yields of 3D stacked memory.

In this paper, a new repair scheme which consists of a new repair algorithm and a base die structure of TSV based 3D memory is proposed. The traditional repair process in 3D memory uses extra cells in each memory layer. This paper proposes a new redundancy cell structure for repairing memory layers using spare cells on the base die which consists of solution memory, spare CAM and a control structure. The experimental results show that the repair rate of the new repair scheme is better than that of the inter-die method.

Background Chronic mitral valvular insufficiency (CMVI) in dogs is very common and might cause clinical signs of congestion and poor tissue perfusion. Hypothesis Poor tissue perfusion from CMVI causes pancreatitis in dogs, as indicated by serum pancreatic lipase concentrations. Animals Sixty-two client-owned dogs consisting of 40 dogs with different stages of heart failure from CMVI and 22 age-matched healthy dogs, based on full cardiac exam and routine laboratory tests. Methods Prospective, controlled, observational study. Serum canine pancreatic lipase immunoreactivity (cPLI) concentrations were determined by quantitative cPLI test in healthy and CMVI groups. Results Serum cPLI concentrations were 54.0 μg/L (IQR: 38.0–78.8 μg/L) in control, 55.0 μg/L (IQR: 38.3–88.8 μg/L) in ISACHC I, 115.0 μg/L (IQR: 45.0–179.0 μg/L) in ISACHC II and 223.0 μg/L (IQR: 119.5–817.5 μg/L) in ISACHC III. Close correlation to serum cPLI concentration was found in the left atrial to aorta (LA/Ao) ratio (r = 0.597; P = .000) and the severity of heart failure (r = 0.530; P = .000). Conclusions and Clinical Importance This study found CMVI is associated with pancreatic injury in congestive heart failure caused by CMVI. Therefore, periodic monitoring on cPLI could be useful in monitoring dogs in heart failure.

Carval syndrome is a severe heartworm infection where the worms have migrated to the right atrium and vena cava; this condition is associated with a myriad of clinical signs. Several non-surgical and interventional methods are currently used for mechanical worm removal. However, the success rate and complications related to these methods are heavily dependent on methodology and retrieval devices used. In this study, we developed a catheter-guided heartworm removal method using a retrieval basket that can easily access pulmonary arteries and increase the number of worms removed per procedure. With this technique, we successfully treated four dogs with caval syndrome.