A tale of two test technologies headed in different directions

By Glenn Woppman
President and CEO
ASSET InterTech

Many of the methods at the basis of non-intrusive board test (NBT) are not new. They've been around for a while and have become well established. That's a good thing because the dynamics of the test industry, both technical and economic, are now aligning with NBT and generating a great deal of momentum for the concept.

You'll see some of that momentum manifested in this issue of Connect. NBT is not a single test technology, but rather a methodology for gaining additional test coverage in a very cost-effective manner. What a concept: more test coverage at less cost!

ASSET is doing its part to get the word out on NBT. In this Connect you'll read about two white papers we've written. One by Alan Sguigna, vice president of sales and marketing, goes over the basics and defines what NBT is and why it's moving to the forefront of the test industry. (Click here to read about Alan's white paper, "Economics, Technology Drive Industry to Non-Intrusive Board Test".)

And, to take a deeper technical dive into a specific instance of NBT, our technical product managers have compiled another white paper on "Non-Intrusive Board Test Strategies for the Intel® Xeon® Processor 5500 Series". Click here to read more about this technical white paper.

In addition to these white papers, we've been busy contributing articles on NBT to several industry trade publications. EPN in Europe will publish an article on NBT by Reg Waller, ASSET's European Regional Director, in the October issue. Another article on NBT by Alan Sguigna will appear in a U.S. publication, Evaluation Engineering, in its December issue.

Stop-loss on test coverage

These white papers and articles point out that the test coverage once provided by intrusive probe-based testers like in-circuit test (ICT), flying probe, MDAs and others is eroding. There are several reasons for this. First, intrusive test technologies are totally dependent on physical contact between a probe or a bed-of-nails fixture and the circuit board that's being tested. Unfortunately, the ability to make physical contact is diminishing. Test pads on circuit boards are being squeezed out or are no longer feasible. Device pins are too fine for physical contact or they are hidden under the silicon die. Even if a probe could be placed on a high-speed serial bus to test its signal integrity, it doesn't work well. Placing a probe on a five gigabit-per-second (Gbps) or faster bus like PCI Express, Intel® QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) or others introduces capacitive anomalies on the bus and renders any test results suspect.

Because it is not based on physical contact, NBT can stop the loss of test coverage. NBT test technologies like boundary scan, processor-controlled test (PCT) and Intel®'s Interconnect Built-In Self Test (IBIST) are software-driven, not hardware-intense. As a result, NBT delivers the test coverage that intrusive technologies simply cannot. And, since NBT is mostly software, it is decidedly much less expensive than intrusive test systems.

The ScanWorks platform

As a platform, ScanWorks is able to host multiple non-intrusive test technologies. Currently, those technologies include boundary scan, PCT and IBIST, but other non-intrusive technologies are on the horizon.

It is an exciting time for NBT because it is based on established, proven technology and it meets a set of very real needs in the test industry. I hope you'll take advantage of this issue of Connect to learn more about NBT and its importance for the test and measurement industry.