Defect avoidance in programmable devices

Programmable logic devices permit a new way to practice yield improvement: redundancy at configuration time. By doing so, the authors avoid the overheads of traditional redundancy: explicit spares, replacement logic and on-chip non-volatile memory. This presentation describes a method for avoiding defects that also does not require a unique place-and-route for each fielded chip. Formal analysis and experimental results show the feasibility of the method for standard, unmodified field-programmable gate arrays.