NVIDIA Corporation
DEFECTIVE CHIP PROCESSING METHOD

Abstract:

When a chip, or manufactured integrate circuit, is found to have a portion that is defective, "floorsweeping" may be used to salvage the working portion of the chip. Floorsweeping involves downgrading, or turning off, the portion of the chip with the defect and then operating the remaining portion of the chip as a lower quality chip than the larger chip that was originally intended. In use, applications will then only use the active portion of the chip. However, the resulting lower quality chip will still have the same static leakage of the larger, non-defective chip. This leakage results from a voltage still being applied to the entire area of the larger chip, even though a portion of that area has been downgraded. The present disclosure provides a method for processing defective chips to form a smaller chip that avoids the excess static leakage associated with floorsweeping by physically removing the defective portion of the chip.