A Shift-Register Based BIST Architecture for FPGA Global Interconnect Testing and Diagnosis

This paper describes the implementation of a shift-register based Built-In Self-Test (BIST) architecture for FPGA global interconnection resources testing. Through this, it is possible to configure FPGA resources that need to be tested in order to obtain high reliability FPGA-based systems. The proposed BIST approach takes advantage of FPGA low-level resources in order to generate cyclic test patterns, analyse testing response and store test results in a simple way. Additionally, the same BIST configuration set is capable of diagnosing the tested interconnection resources with no additional configurations thereby reducing time requirements. This paper presents the proposed BIST architecture and its diagnosis scheme, its implementation on a Xilinx FPGA, and experimental results.