NASA Office of Logic Design

NASA Office of Logic Design

A scientific study of the problems of digital engineering for space flight systems,
with a view to their practical solution.


NASA Test of Actel SX-A, SX-S and SX-SU FPGAs

Design and Test Differences

The NASA design and test is heavily based on the "Industry Tiger Team's" work and there is much in common.  There are, however, a number of differences.  The table below highlights a number of the significant differences.

  Industry Tiger Team NASA
ATE Testing: Temperature Room temperature only -55 ºC, 25 ºC, and +125 ºC prior to start of testing and at each key point.
ATE Testing: Coverage Full internal coverage; subset of I/O parameters. Full internal coverage and complete read and record coverage of I/O parameters.
In-Chamber Environment: Temperature Mostly room temperature. Steps at -55 ºC and +125 ºC
In-Chamber Environment: Voltage Mostly nominal 2.5VDC. Starts at the recommended maximum of 2.75 VDC.
Loading (A maximum fanout of 24 permitted by design rule checker) Maximum fanout of 16. 23 nets have fanout of 29 and 1 net with fanout of 28.
Device Stimulation Three internal ring oscillators; frequency varies with device temperature, voltage, and individual device. External clock generation and division making stimulation independent of temperature and voltage.
Clock Usage One routed array clock; HCLK static. Routed array clock and HCLK both dynamically exercised. HCLK provides for tighter control of SSO/SSU stress.
Delay Measurement Indirect - no mechanism to break ring and measure delay directly.  Significant startup stabilization time. Direct propagation delay measurement; no startup stabilization issues.
I/O Standards All TTL A combination of TTL and CMOS I/O configurations
Place and Route Mostly automatic, some manual placement of the ring oscillator circuits. Shift register R-Cells manually placed to improve utilization of Long Vertical Tracks (LVT) and Long Horizontal Tracks (LHT).  I/O driving R-Cells manually placed for tighter control of SSO/SSU stress.

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Last Revised: October 25, 2004
Digital Engineering Institute
Web Grunt: Richard Katz
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