FPGA Based Low Cost Automatic Test Equipment for Digital Circuits

Testing of digital circuits is a crucialproblem. There are two types of Automatic Test Equipment (ATE): Very precisebut complex and expensive test equipments called high-end ATE and theirapproximate but cheap alternatives called low-end ATE. In this paper we proposea very cheap, FPGA based embedded low-cost ATE (ELATE) that is capable offunctional, speed/delay and power consumption tests. It is composed of FPGAhardware with six FSM modules written in Verilog and a computer software (userinterface) communicating with the FPGA through UART. It can handle differentI/O combinations and can detect delay with 4ns precision. It can both visuallyshow the resultant voltage/current-time graphs and store them as text files.The ATE is tested on different Design Under Test (DUT) devices like 8-bit and12-bit adders and a square root circuit implemented on FPGA.

Cite this article as: Bayrakçi AA. FPGABased Low Cost Automatic Test Equipment for Digital Circuits. Electrica, 2019;19(1): 12-21.