Boundary scan is optimised for flying probes

Tools enable an unrivalled level of interaction between flying probe access and boundary scan access for board level test applications, embracing all phases of IEEE1149.1 applications.

Goepel Electronic has developed a new generation of intelligent tools for its System Cascon boundary scan software platform that improve integration with flying probe testers.

The newly developed tools enable an unrivalled level of interaction between flying probe access and boundary scan access for board level test applications, embracing all phases of IEEE1149.1 applications in a completely integrated environment, including the management of boundary scan and nonboundary scan components, automatic test program generation (ATPG) using both boundary scan and flying probe access, automatic pin fault diagnostics (PFD), graphical fault localisation, and even debugging.

"Flying probe as well as boundary scan are technologies applied to solve problems related to reduced test access, but only the interactive use of the probes as additional access points during boundary scan tests enables extended test coverage and reduced test time making it a simple decision for the user on the value added", says Thomas Wenzel, Managing Director of Goepel Electronic's Boundary Scan Division.

"With our improved tools we not only set new standards for flexible use of flying probes; we also resolved difficulties in such interactive test applications caused by limited reliability of probe access, eg due to dirt particles, thereby essentially improving the test quality of the combined methods".

A crucial part of the software is a completely new control algorithm for the interaction between probes and boundary scan, which has been implemented in all ATPG tools and pin fault diagnostic processors in System Cascon.

This new algorithm improves the efficiency and reliability of the interactive use of flying probe access for extended boundary scan applications, a technology introduced by Goepel Electronic several years ago as Virtual ScanPin.

With these advancements, the probes can now not only be used to improve the test coverage of interconnection tests but also for other applications such as cluster tests or even manually created tests that would benefit from dynamic repositioning of probes for additional test access.

In principle, the number of probes supported by this method is not limited.

Detected faults are diagnosed after test execution by means of intelligent Pin Fault Diagnostic processors.

A new feature, which has been introduced in order to improve the reliability of the combined flying-probe/boundary-scan tests, can repeat a particular test step in case of a detected fault without impairing the quality of diagnostics, with the number of repetitions being definable by the user.

In System Cascon, all test operations are based on the native boundary scan programming language Caslan.

This allows the stepwise execution with the integrated ScanAssist multi-mode debugger, providing insight to all IEEE1149.x resources of compliant devices, such as registers and TAP states, and supporting the visualisation of logic values on nets and pins, including those accessed by the flying probes acting as virtual boundary scan pins.

These debug capabilities proof beneficial especially for failure analysis.

Identified faults can be visualised in the PCB layout via the integrated Scan Vision tools.

These enhanced tools for integration of boundary scan and flying probe tests are available with System Cascon version 4.4.1 and can be activated via the software's licence manager.

This new software release is free of charge for all users with valid maintenance contract.

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