IMPLEMENTATION OF AN INTEGRATED FPGA BASED AUTOMATIC TEST EQUIPMENT AND TEST GENERATION FOR DIGITAL CIRCUITS

This paper describes the implementation of easy to use and reconfigurable automatic test equipment based on FPGA using Xilinx family. With respect to most of other ATEs, no microprocessor or microcontroller is fitted on the programmable resource. The testers are predominantly used to test digital PCBs or processors or Circuits, physically. The results are necessary to validate any Digital Hardware. The digital pattern generators & imported logic analyzers are very expensive for everybody involved in Electronics Design to afford, as they run into Lackhs of Rupees (more expensive than the Design cost itself). So, we need to evolve some low cost, Indigenous & accurate PC based equipment, which can perform the test vector generation, & provide required signals to test. We will be using Xilinx (Version 12.4) and FPGA for implementation of digital test pattern generation, since we can implement digital glue logic up to 200K gates & the design can be scaled up to 32 channels, without difficulty. This test system can easily be modified for use with any logic family, since the test hardware is essentially independent of the particular test chip. Thus the system is completely flexible for use in most small & medium-scale testing application. The test set for each IC is an exhaustive set of all possible input combinations; this ATE is used for SSI & MSI functions. Very-large-scale integration (VLSI) is the process of creating integrated circuits by combining thousands of transistor-based circuits into a single chip. VLSI began in the 1970s when complex semiconductor and communication technologies were being developed. The microprocessor is a VLSI device. The term is no longer as common as it once was, as chips have increased in complexity into the hundreds of millions of transistors