ASSET experts dissect non-intrusive board test (NBT)

Two articles in upcoming publications that serve the test and measurement industry take a close look at non-intrusive board test (NBT) and the technical and economic reasons why the industry is shifting toward this test methodology. Featuring the non-intrusive test technologies of boundary-scan test, processor-controlled test (PCT) and Intel®’s Interconnect Built-In Self Test (IBIST), the ScanWorks platform for embedded instrumentation is the leading NBT system today.

ASSET’s European director, Reg Waller, has a feature-length article scheduled for the November issue of EPN (Electronic Product News magazine), a pan-European English language publication that reaches more than 60,000 engineers in the electronics, computer and communications industries. This issue will be distributed at the Productronica exhibition in Munich that month. The second major article is authored by Alan Sguigna, ASSET’s vice president of sales and marketing, and will appear in the December issue of Evaluation Engineering magazine, that is published in the United States.

The articles contrast the older probe-based intrusive test technologies like in-circuit test (ICT), manufacturing defect analyzers (MDA), flying probe and others, which require expensive hardware-intense systems and fixtures, with the cost-effective, software-driven NBT technologies that run on a PC and insert board tests via a small connector. Today, the JTAG interface is typically employed for this purpose, but other interfaces could be used in the future.