Variation and reliability in FPGAs

This paper focuses on variability and reliability issues for FPGAs, showing how these issues can be effectively addressed using one of the most powerful features of FPGAs. One of the most powerful features of FPGAs is their ability and flexibility to be reconfigured. The paper also presents techniques for characterizing variability and degradation in these systems. It discusses the empirical approach that is adopted to understand and confront these problems in field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). An important application for on-chip measurement is to produce a map of intra-die variation across a device. This helps in understanding the statistical properties of the delay variation, such as its spatial correlation, and is the first step towards mitigating the problem.