Ways for board and system test to benefit from FPGA embedded instrumentation

With continually growing adoption of FPGA based designs, and more features and capabilities available in FPGAs, board and system level test applications can - and should - take advantage of FPGA embedded instrumentation. Such FPGA assisted tests not only improve manufacturing test but also allow extensive testing in the field to address issues such as no-fault-found syndrome by enabling the detection of environment-induced defects or latent defects (related to bad solder joint quality, aging, etc.). In this paper we are briefly reviewing different types of FPGA embedded instruments before specifically addressing synthetic instrumentation and focusing on example use cases. We will be discussing design for test considerations, quality of test and diagnostics, savings in test time and test cost, and levels of automation previously not associated with functional and performance / stress test development.