FPGA Based Low Cost Automatic Test Equipment for Digital Circuits

Year 2019, Volume: 19 Issue: 1, 12 - 21, 01.01.2019

Alp Arslan Bayrakci

Abstract

DOI: 10.26650/electrica.2018.28093

Testing of digital circuits is a crucial
problem. There are two types of Automatic Test Equipment (ATE): Very precise
but complex and expensive test equipments called high-end ATE and their
approximate but cheap alternatives called low-end ATE. In this paper we propose
a very cheap, FPGA based embedded low-cost ATE (ELATE) that is capable of
functional, speed/delay and power consumption tests. It is composed of FPGA
hardware with six FSM modules written in Verilog and a computer software (user
interface) communicating with the FPGA through UART. It can handle different
I/O combinations and can detect delay with 4ns precision. It can both visually
show the resultant voltage/current-time graphs and store them as text files.
The ATE is tested on different Design Under Test (DUT) devices like 8-bit and
12-bit adders and a square root circuit implemented on FPGA.

Cite this article as: Bayrakçi AA. FPGA
Based Low Cost Automatic Test Equipment for Digital Circuits. Electrica, 2019;
19(1): 12-21.

Keywords

FPGA, test, functional, automatic test equipment, digital circuit, delay, power

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