A Digital On-line Monitor for Detecting Intermittent Resistance Faults at Board Level

The reliability of board-level data communications intensively depends on the reliability of interconnections on a board. One of the most challenging interconnections reliability threats is intermittent resistive faults (IRFs). Detecting such faults is a major challenge. The main reason is the random behavior of these faults. They may occur randomly in time, duration and amplitude. The occurrence rate can vary from a few nanoseconds to months. This paper investigates IRF detection at the board level by introducing a new digital in situ IRF monitor. Hardware-based fault injection has been used to validate the proposed IRF monitor. As case studies, two widely used on-board transmission protocols namely the Universal Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter (UART) and the Serial Peripheral Interface bus (SPI), have been used. In addition, one fault management framework, based on the IJTAG standard, has been implemented to collect and characterize information from the monitors. The experimental results show that the proposed monitor is effective in detecting IRFs at the board level.