ELATE: Embedded Low Cost Automatic Test Equipment for FPGA Based Testing of Digital Circuits

Abstract

Testing digital circuits is very crucial but very complex and expensive if high end Automatic Test Equipments (ATE) are employed. In this paper we propose an embedded low cost ATE (ELATE) based on FPGA hardware in communication with computer software, which is able to perform not only the functional tests but also the propagation delay and power consumption tests. The methodology and solution approach explained in this paper can be used to eliminate some generic problems of FPGA based automatic testing as well as to design more precise digital system test equipment by only replacing the underlying hardware components with the better and faster ones.