FPGA Based Low Cost Automatic Test Equipment for Digital Circuits

Testing of digital circuits is a crucial problem. There are two types of Automatic Test Equipment (ATE): Very precise but complex and expensive test equipments called high-end ATE and their approximate but cheap alternatives called low-end ATE. In this paper we propose a very cheap, FPGA based embedded low-cost ATE (ELATE) that is capable of functional, speed/delay and power consumption tests. It is composed of FPGA hardware with six FSM modules written in Verilog and a computer software (user interface) communicating with the FPGA through UART. It can handle different I/O combinations and can detect delay with 4ns precision. It can both visually show 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 and 12-bit adders and a square root circuit implemented on FPGA. Keywords: FPGA, automatic test equipment, digital circuit, functional, delay, power, test