Intel Corporation
Integrated circuits with in-field diagnostic and repair capabilities

Abstract:

An integrated circuit may include an embedded test processor that is capable of performing in-field testing and repair of hardware-related defects without having to remove the integrated circuit from the customer's board. The test processor can be used to drive and monitor test vectors to performing defect screening on input-output circuitry, logic circuitry including lookup table (LUT) circuits and digital signal processing (DSP) circuits, transceiver circuitry, and configuration random-access memory circuitry. The test processor can generate a failure mechanism report and selectively fix repairable defects via a hardware redundancy scheme. The failure mechanism report allows the customer to identify the root cause of failure in the overall system.