Run-time reconfigurable instruments for advanced board-level testing

Abstract

The last decade has seen increasingly rapid growth in the prevalence of FPGA devices. Today, FPGAs are extensively used in all commercial sectors, like communications, consumer, military and industry. Test engineers also recognized a great potential of FPGAs for test and measurement (T&M) purposes. The main benefit of FPGA devices is a possibility for hardware reconfiguration. This feature turns FPGAs into a flexible hardware base for T&M instrumentation. Multiple different instruments can be implemented and executed on the same FPGA device, thus significantly reducing the expense of purchasing stand-alone hardware instruments. At the same time, FPGAs being integrated to the system can also be exploited as a platform for embedded instrumentation (EI) [1]. In this work, we consider an approach that temporarily reuses an existing on-board FPGA resource to carry out necessary manufacturing tests. As the allocated FPGA logic is reclaimed for functional use after the test is finished, the presented technique does not require hardware changes and thus does not introduce additional costs.