Built-in quality assurance

The increasing requirements of product quality and availability demand an effective discipline in quality assurance. The continuous expansion of the capabilities of new products, and the need to reduce their life-cycle cost and realization intervals add more stringent requirements to the above quality assurance needs. This paper discusses an approach consisting of a self-contained and reusable built-in hardware capability. In its basic form, this built-in solution performs built-in self-test, and can be extended to built-in self-diagnosis and built-in self-repair for reliability and availability purposes. Moreover, this discipline not only provides an effective quality assurance, but also helps reduce the life-cycle cost and the realization interval of a product