Diagnosing Programmable Interconnect Systems for FPGAs

This paper deals with the diagnosis of field programmable interconnect systems (FPIS) in which nets are connected through programmable switches arranged in grids. A hierarchical approach to diagnosis is proposed. The conditions by which such process yields full diagnosis and the characteristics of the programming sequence, are fully proved. For a FPIS consisting of a k x k grid array, the number of tests is given by 4 + 4kn^2, while the number of programming steps is 4nk + 1, where n is the dimension of a grid. The application of this technique to commercially available FPIS in FPGAs, is discussed.