Digital synchronization for reconfigurable ATE

This work introduces a digital synchronization technique for a highly reconfigurable ATE platform that overcomes inherent scaling, multisite, and other limitations in currently used instrument synchronization methods. A new strategy for integrated circuit test synchronisation across several active test and measurement instruments are described. This strategy is much more flexible than currently available star or bus trigger arrangements, and is more accurate as well. The second synchronization mechanism in ATE is a vector synchronisation. The logic to implement the described mechanisms has been successfully implemented in a Xilinx Virtex2 FPGA.