Super interesting work, thank you for the follow up. Some of my customers use stuff like this so it's nice to see someone from the supply side. It's interesting to think about the different kinds of defects. "Not like the rest" is a fairly easy kind of defect to detect, "Structurally different from the baseline" is a bit harder and a whole batch that is different in some important aspect is quite hard.

FPGAs are super powerful for applications like these, I see them used in plenty of sensors where flexibility and being future proof is a must so that you don't need to redesign the entire sensor for every variation on the theme.