An Easily Testable Routing Architecture and Efficient Test Technique

Abstract

Generally, a programmable LSI such as an FPGA is difficult to test as compared to an ASIC. There are two major reasons for this. One is that automatic test pattern generator (ATPG) cannot be used because of the programmability of the FPGA. The other reason is that the FPGA architecture is very complex. In this paper, we propose a novel FPGA architecture that will simplify the testing of the device. The architecture is very simple and has several types of circuit blocks and orderly wire connections. This paper also presents efficient test configurations for our proposed architecture. We tested the interconnects of our architecture by using our configurations and achieved 100% test coverage for a short test time.