Application-Specific Bridging Fault Testing of FPGAs

Abstract

In this paper, a new technique for testing the interconnects of any arbitrary design mapped into an FPGA is presented. In this technique, only the configuration of logic blocks used in the design is changed, and the structure of the design remains unchanged. The test vector and configuration generation problem is systematically converted to a Boolean satisfiability (SAT) problem, and state of the art SAT-solvers are exploited for test vector and configuration generation. Experimental results on various benchmark circuits show that only two test configurations are required to test for all bridging faults, achieving 100% fault coverage, with respect to the fault list. Moreover, test vector and configuration generation time is less than a second for all benchmark designs.