An application-independent delay testing methodology for island-style FPGA

A novel fault model for detecting delay defects of FPGAs is proposed in this paper. Our fault model assumes that a target segment can be covered by a shortest path which is realizable in an FPGA, and the path will guarantee to detect delay defects which affect the performance of the segment. Given the proposed fault model, we also developed a framework to search for the target paths and find appropriate tests, which is independent to the size of FPGAs. Several methods are also proposed to minimize the number of test configurations (the test time). The tests can achieve a high coverage of delay defects with reasonable test time.