An FPGA-based monitoring system for reliability analysis

Electronics density continue to increase which impacts the power density and thermal hot spots on the printed circuit boards. The reliability and prediction of the electronics failure rate is often related to the thermal stress induced during different operating conditions at the board. To get information about the environmental conditions and to assist in the prediction of a product's failure rate a monitoring system could be used. This paper presents a temperature monitoring function implemented in an FPGA using VHDL. The proposed system is composed of a number of temperature sensors together with a non-volatile MRAM memory for long-term storage. The solution offers a flexible system that could be scaled to an arbitrary number of sensors and be adapted to any FPGA or processor technology. To verify the concept, a climate chamber was used to simulate a number of different environmental settings followed by a reading of the data logged.