Patent 8122307 was granted and assigned to Synopsys on February, 2012 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
One Time Programmable (OTP) memory structures and methods for pretesting the support circuitry are provided. A group of dedicated test cells associated with one or more groups of regular OTP cells are used to test the support circuitry for the regular OTP cells. The dedicated cells are programmed and read. The read values are compared to the programmed values or expected values. As a result of the comparison, failing memories may be designated “Not Usable”, while regular OTP cells of passing memories can be programmed for their purpose resulting in elimination of wasted memories during test.