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Success Stories

JTAG Training and Memory Interconnect Test pay off quickly for manufacturer of high-speed wireless equipment

If Michael Hinz, digital hardware design engineer at Navini Networks, were setting up a test strategy, the first piece of equipment he would acquire would be ASSET's ScanWorks boundary-scan test and in-system programming solution.

"With our boards, there's just no other way to do a thorough test except with boundary scan," Michael explained. "We have a lot of ball grid array (BGA) packages and some boards have a lot of memory. Boundary scan is the only way to test many of these types of devices. We've found ScanWorks' Memory Interconnect Test very useful with some of our memory-intensive boards. We have been able to get test coverage close to 90 percent using only ScanWorks."

Navini makes wireless broadband technology, including base stations, customer premise equipment (CPE), and an element management system for service providers to be able to offer a new wireless broadband service to their customers.

Hinz first attended the ASSET ScanWorks Test Development Workshop and then dove right into developing and implementing boundary-scan tests.

"ScanWorks is easy to use. I played around with it for a couple of days before I went to training and, as a result, I was ready for the training," he said. "I learned some shortcuts and easier ways of doing things in the class. I also learned how the ScanWorks system generates tests and that has been very useful."

After completing his training, Hinz was able to generate boundary-scan tests in a matter of days. He found that with a little effort, he could boost boundary-scan test coverage from approximately 50 percent with boundary-scan interconnect tests to 90 percent through the addition of boundary-scan memory interconnect tests. Especially useful to achieve this dramatic increase was ScanWorks' Memory Interconnect Test product. When applied to some of Navini's boards, Hinz found that Memory Interconnect Test was able to pinpoint manufacturing defects much more efficiently than any of the functional test routines he was running.

"Memory Interconnect Test has a lot to offer when it comes to improving the test coverage on a board," he said. "We tried using functional tests to locate faults with memory, but it was very difficult. Functional tests would give us a list of faults that might be causing the problem, but it still took a lot of time to investigate all of those possibilities. With ScanWorks' Memory Interconnect Test we knew exactly where the fault was. That saves us a lot of time and effort."

Hinz estimates that his savings from testing only 20 boards more than made up for the cost of ScanWorks' Memory Interconnect Test. In addition, he said that the ScanWorks Manufacturing Station paid for itself after testing just 10-20 boards.

For more information on Navini Networks, please visit www.navini.com.

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