ScanWorks ensures quality of boundary scan implementation in chips of a leading provider of DVD chipsets

Interestingly enough, the board testing capabilities of ASSET's ScanWorks boundary-scan test environment has become a critical tool for a developer of integrated circuits (ICs) for the optical storage industry.

MediaTek, a fabless IC company, has been a pioneer in IC solutions for digital consumer products, wireless communication devices and optical storage drives, including CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, CD-R/RW and DVD-RW drives, and DVD players. The company was founded in 1997. The company’s headquarters is in Hsinchu, Taiwan. MediaTek has more than 900 employees worldwide, 80 percent of whom work in research and development capacities. Electronics industry market research firm In-Stat/MDR recently ranked MediaTek as the No. 2 supplier of MPEG video ICs in 2003.

"We are very concerned about the quality of our products and the support services we provide our customers," said a Senior Project Manager of MediaTek. "For our customers, boundary scan is an important test technology because their products must be extremely reliable and manufactured to high quality standards. As a result, many of our customers make extensive use of boundary scan test methods. And, for MediaTek, that means that the boundary scan description language (BSDL) files we provide for our IC devices must be of the highest quality possible and completely accurate. Validating the BSDL files for our ICs and verifying the quality of our implementations of boundary scan in our chips are important functions that ScanWorks provides us."

In addition, MediaTek manufactures many different types of printed circuit boards which are used by customers and prospective customers as evaluation platforms for the company's ICs. Having an evaluation board with no faults or flaws is imperative if the benefits of MediaTek's ICs are to be fully analyzed. As a result, MediaTek has turned to ScanWorks to verify the quality of the design of its evaluation platforms before they are ever placed in the hands of prospective customers. Moreover, MediaTek plans to provide its customers the ScanWorks test project that was used to verify the design of the evaluation platform. With this ScanWorks project as a basis, MediaTek's customers will have a head start on a boundary scan test suite for its product.

"We want each one of our evaluation boards to be tested as thoroughly as possible because we have a lot riding on our customer's experience with the evaluation board," said a Senior Project Manager of MediaTek, "If there's a flaw on the board, the customer may attribute any performance anomaly to our device and we can't have that happen. Our evaluation platforms are showcases for all of the research and development we've put into our ICs. With ScanWorks we've been able to quickly develop boundary scan tests that identify and diagnose any faults in the design of our evaluation boards long before any customer sees them."

These high standards for quality will become increasingly important to MediaTek in the future. The company has determined that it will soon offer solutions for the wireless telecommunications industry as it continues its global growth strategy.

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