Abstract: Disclosed are embodiments of an apparatus incorporating a detection circuit adapted for determining the state of selected fuses and a programming circuit for blowing selected fuses on demand. Also, disclosed are embodiments of an associated method. The detection circuit comprises a plurality of fuses in identical signal and reference legs in order to increase the signal margin for detecting blown fuses and/or current sources configured to pass offset currents through the signal and reference legs in order to set the trip point for detecting blown fuses between the un-blown and the minimum blown resistances. Thus, the invention provides the flexibility of single-sided fuse state detection devices with even greater sensitivity than both single-sided and differential fuse state detection device.

Abstract: The write path of an MRAM device is precharged before starting a write operation of a magnetic memory cell, increasing the speed of the write operation and decreasing the write cycle time. The reference wires are precharged, which provides better control over the wordline and bitline write pulses and results in shorter rise times. The precharge time can be hidden in the address decoding time or redundancy evaluation time. A circuit design for a global reference current generator is also described herein. A fast on circuit is also disclosed that increases the speed of precharging the reference wires.