Implementing a self-testing 8051 microprocessor

This work presents the preliminary results obtained for the high level implementation of a self-testing 8051 microprocessor. From an existing VHDL description of the microprocessor, six main blocks were identified: a state generation block, a control unit, a validation block, an ALU, a RAM and a ROM. For five of them, a test strategy was studied and implemented, so that the whole circuit embedded test structures capable of performing the microprocessor test at-speed. In this paper, we present the test strategies used and the implementation results achieved from a synthesis process in a FPGA environment.