Support for Nehalem and EP80579 Integrated Processor family
ASSET’s MicroMaster CPU emulation-based test and diagnostic system now supports Intel’s new multi-core Nehalem micro-architecture as well as the company’s new system-on-a-chip (SOC) technology, the EP80579 Integrated Processor family.
With MicroMaster, design and manufacturing engineers are able to apply powerful functional test and diagnostic routines to circuit board designs featuring Nehalem or EP80579 processors, improving the quality of the system and speeding the product’s time-to-market. MicroMaster’s CPU emulation technology takes control of a CPU or a core in the CPU, and by doing so, it is able to assert functional tests and diagnostic routines on other devices and buses on the circuit board.
“We have heard that many server, workstation, desktop and mobile system manufacturers have been eagerly anticipating processors based on the Nehalem architecture. We knew it would be important for us to get out there early and support them,” said Larry Osborn, ASSET’s MicroMaster product manager. “Since early adopters are already developing with Nehalem and EP80579 SOCs, they will be able to take advantage of MicroMaster and start developing structural and functional test strategies for their designs.”
Next-Generation Processors
Intel has disclosed that Nehalem processors will have from one to eight or more processing cores as well as simultaneous multithreading of two to 16 threads per chip. It is expected that future Nehalem processors will include options such as system interconnects and an integrated graphics engine.
The EP80579 Integrated Processors comprise a family of enterprise-class SOCs that integrate several system components into a single chip, reducing space requirements by as much as 45 percent and power consumption by approximately 20 percent compared to discrete implementations. Throughput performance and processor efficiency are also improved. The EP80579 integrates a memory controller and I/O controller with processing cores. Among the applications targeted for the family of SOCs are small form factor single board computers (SBC) for the communication and embedded computing marketplace.
MicroMaster and ScanWorks in e-JTAG
MicroMaster, as a part of the ScanWorks embedded instrumentation platform, can help manufacturers identify faults early in the design cycle, improving prototype yields and accelerating time-to-market. By integrating MicroMaster with ScanWorks in the Extended JTAG Coverage (e-JTAG) solution, manufacturers are able to apply both CPU emulation functional tests and diagnostics, as well as extensive boundary scan structural tests and diagnostics to production boards, substantially reducing manufacturing costs and improving quality.
In addition to the Nehalem micro-architecture and the EP80579 family, MicroMaster supports many other Intel processors, including Atom, Centrino, Core Duo, Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Extreme, Core 2 Quad, and the entire Xeon family. Non-Intel processors supported include chips from AMD, Freescale, IBM, Marvell’s XScale, TI’s OMAP, ARM, AMCC and others.
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