Built-in Self Repair by Reconfiguration of FPGAs

Abstract

Systems on a chip (SoCs) in safety-critical applications need features such as built-in self-test, on-line self-test and error compensation of transient faults. With ever-shrinking feature size, also built-in self-repair (BISR) may become a must. While BIST and BISR are well understood and frequently implemented for embedded memory blocks, BISR for random logic is by far an unsolved problem. Logic circuits based on field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are a technology base that allows for functional reconfiguration in the field of application. In this paper we investigate on the possibilities and limitations of logic BISR for FPGAs