Roving STARs: an integrated approach to on-line testing, diagnosis, and fault tolerance for FPGAs in adaptive computing systems

We present an integrated approach to on-line FPGA testing, diagnosis and fault tolerance, to be used in high-reliability and high-availability hardware. The testing and diagnostic process takes place in Self-Testing AReas (STARs) of the FPGA, without disturbing the normal system operation. The entir...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:3rd Nasa/-Dod Workshop on Evolvable Hardware, 2001, Long Beach, CA pp. 73 - 92
Main Authors: Abramovici, M., Emmert, J.M., Stroud, C.E.
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Published: IEEE 2001
Subjects:
Automatic testing
Circuit testing
Fault diagnosis
Fault tolerance
Fault tolerant systems
Field programmable gate arrays
Logic testing
Programmable control
Runtime
System testing
ISBN:0769511805, 9780769511801
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:We present an integrated approach to on-line FPGA testing, diagnosis and fault tolerance, to be used in high-reliability and high-availability hardware. The testing and diagnostic process takes place in Self-Testing AReas (STARs) of the FPGA, without disturbing the normal system operation. The entire chip is tested by roving the STARs across the FPGA. Our approach guarantees complete testing of both logic cells and interconnect with maximum diagnostic resolution. Our multi-level fault-tolerant technique allows using partially defective logic and routing resources for normal operation, providing longer mission life in the presence of faults. In addition, our dynamic fault-tolerant method ensures that spare resources are always present in the neighborhood of the located fault, thus simplifying fault-bypassing. Our complete method has been successfully implemented and demonstrated on the ORCA 2CA series FPGAs from Lucent Technologies.
ISBN:0769511805
9780769511801
DOI:10.1109/EH.2001.937949