FPGA based low-cost Portable Tester with On-Board Supplies

Post silicon validation is considered as an important step in the life-cycle of an integrated circuit. With shrinking transistor size and increasing design complexity, it becomes imperative for a design to undergo silicon characterization to check its correctness and verify the robustness of its fabrication. Usually, the high-end Automatic Test Equipments (ATEs) are reserved for production phase testing and its access become limited for the debug phase by resulting in longer product cycles. In this paper, a low-cost FPGA based test platform is proposed to remain capable for handling functional tests using test bench implementation. It does not require any special equipment and can be easily operated with a laptop. The platform has on-board user configurable supplies and all the digital lines can be dynamically controlled by using FPGA.