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OBSERVATIONS

A tale of two test technologies headed in different directions
Non-intrusive board test turns test & measurement inside out

Glenn Woppman
President and CEO
ASSET InterTech

It's an oxymoron, but true. 'Intrusive' is out.' Non-intrusive' is in. What's really 'in' is test coverage.

When a technology or type of technology provides too little of it, test engineers look elsewhere to replace the lost coverage. That's what's happening these days as the coverage provided by intrusive probe-based test technologies diminishes and the coverage provided by non-intrusive board test (NBT) technologies increases. What's more, the price tag on NBT is miniscule compared to intrusive test. It's a tale of two technologies heading in different directions.

TEST DATA OUT

Variances in PCB manufacturing processes can betray confidence in SerDes designs

Validating the design of high-speed SerDes (serializer /deserializer) interconnects on the first production batch of a printed circuit board (PCB) might allow the validation engineer to sleep that night, but it's no assurance that the SerDes will maintain that level of performance once the circuit board hits high-volume manufacturing. Variances in manufacturing processes are all too common. They can betray the confidence that limited validation testing has bestowed on the design. In this, the first part of a two-part series, some of the causes of manufacturing variances are discussed. In the next issue of Connect, part two will explain how embedded instrumentation is solving this problem by making SerDes validation possible during manufacturing and throughout the product's life cycle.

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Paper takes a deep technical dive into test strategies for the Intel® Xeon® Processor 5500 Series (Nehalem)

The whitepaper, "Non-Intrusive Board Test Strategies for the Intel® Xeon® Processor 5500 Series," which is now available on the ASSET web site, offers a deep technical dive into the intricacies of testing circuit boards based on Intel's new micro-architecture, codenamed Nehalem. Designs based on the Nehalem microarchitecture present challenges for the older intrusive probe-based technologies such as ICT, Manufacturing Defect Analysis (MDA), flying probe and others that have relied upon physical access for many years. Unfortunately, that physical access is going away. Fortunately, a non-intrusive board test strategy does not rely on physical access.

INSIDE ASSET

Former NI executive, Tim Dehne, sees a great future for ASSET
Dehne excited about joining ASSET's board of directors

Tim Dehne, formerly a senior executive at National Instruments (NI) in its research and development and marketing departments and currently the vice president of systems and research and development for Luminex Corporation, Austin, TX, has been named to ASSET's board of directors. When Tim joined NI more than 21 years ago, it was a $15 million company. He witnessed its growth into an $824 million firm. In a question-and-answer session, Mr. Dehne explained his unbridled enthusiasm for ASSET's future. Tim has also been named a member of the board of directors of Cirrus Logic of Austin, Texas.

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Non-intrusive board test (NBT), IJTAG top Users Group meeting at ITC
Recovering lost test coverage, chip-level Internal JTAG will highlight discussions

Plans are being made for the next ScanWorks® Users Group meeting, which will coincide with the International Test Conference (ITC), Nov. 3-5 in Austin, Texas. At the top of the agenda will be presentations on non-intrusive board test (NBT) and the Internal JTAG standard (IEEE P1687) which will soon be sent out for a ratification vote. The NBT presentations will focus on how this methodology can recover the test coverage that intrusive test technologies have lost in recent years.

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Cray will embed ScanWorks® into next-generation supercomputers
Cray and ASSET to collaborate on embedded test

ASSET and Cray, Inc., the foremost supercomputer supplier in the world, have entered into a collaborative development agreement which will produce embedded test logic intellectual property (IP) based on the ScanWorks® platform for embedded instrumentation. This IP will be embedded into Cray's next-generation supercomputers to support high-reliability and remote diagnostics.

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A test fable….Part 1

It takes a village to live down initials like 'NTF'

Norm never thought much of his initials, NTF, until he landed a job just out of college in telecom customer support. Since then, he's been paying the price for his mother's twisted sense of humor. Lately, in fact, the 'no trouble found' syndrome has become something of an obsession for him. In Part 1 of this two-part fable, Norm -- or NTF as his merciless colleagues in customer support insist on calling him -- comes to terms with his unfortunate sobriquet and he takes a huge step toward removing the trouble from 'no trouble found.'

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New whitepaper discusses the imperatives driving non-intrusive board test (NBT)

A new whitepaper entitled "Economics, Technology Drive Industry to Non-Intrusive Board Test" has been written by Alan Sguigna, vice president of sales and marketing, and posted to ASSET's web site.

After defining what NBT is, the paper analyzes some of the factors, both economic and technical, that are causing more test strategies to include NBT technologies, such as boundary-scan test, processor-controlled test (PCT) and tools to utilize Intel®'s embedded instrumentation, Interconnect Built-In Self Test (IBIST).

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ASSET in the news:

ASSET experts dissect non-intrusive board test (NBT)

Two upcoming feature articles on non-intrusive board test (NBT) by ASSET experts dissect the technical and economic dynamics that are shifting the test and measurement industry toward the more cost-effective, software-driven test technologies that make up NBT. Don't miss the October issue of EPN in Europe and December's Evaluation Engineering in the U.S.

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ScanWorks® is first with Intel® Xeon® Processor 5500 Series (Nehalem) validation and test

The ScanWorks® platform for embedded instrumentation became the first non-intrusive test system to support Intel®’s new microarchitecture in that company’s Xeon® Processor 5500 Series. The new chip’s microarchitecture has been referred to under the codename Nehalem for some time now. ScanWorks supports structural and functional circuit board test as well as signal integrity validation of designs based on the Xeon® Processor 5500 Series.

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New Dispatcher applies tests to an unlimited number of circuit boards

The new Dispatcher for the ScanWorks® platform for embedded instrumentation reduces test costs by allowing test operators to apply tests and perform diagnostics on any number of circuit boards. The units under test (UUT) can be local to the ScanWorks platform or literally halfway around the globe.

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