On-Chip BIST-Based Diagnosis of Embedded Programmable Logic Cores in System-on-Chip Devices

On-chip Built-In Self-Test (BIST) based diagnosis of the embedded Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) core in a generic System-on-Chip (SoC) is presented. In this approach, the embedded processor core in the SoC is used for reconfiguration of the FPGA core for BIST, initiating the BIST sequence, retrieving the BIST results, and for performing diagnosis of faulty programmable logic blocks, memory cores, programmable interconnect resources within the FPGA core based on failing BIST results. These BIST and BIST-based diagnostic procedures have been implemented and verified on a commercial SoC with fault injection emulation. Diagnostic resolution is achieved to the faulty logic or memory block and can be used for on-chip reconfiguration to bypass faulty resources for fault-tolerant applications.