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Asset InterTech Aligns with Embedded Instrumentation
(Wireless News Via Acquire Media NewsEdge)
Responding to the increasing momentum in the electronics industry
toward embedded instrumentation, Asset InterTech announced that it is
positioning the company, its products and its technologies to provide
open tools for embedded instrumentation in design validation, test, and
debug applications.
The company stated that many of the established validation and test
technologies are inadequate or ineffective for high-speed chips, I/O
buses and systems. Moreover, new chip geometries at 45 nanometers (nm)
or smaller, as well as chip-level packaging technologies like
system-in-package (SiP) are making validation, test and debug very
difficult, if not impossible with traditional technologies. Building on
its position in non-intrusive boundary-scan structural tests based on
the IEEE 1149.1 JTAG standard, Asset indicated that it has
significantly enhanced its ScanWorks platform over the last several
years with embedded instrumentation capabilities.
According to Glenn Woppman, president and CEO of Asset, the company
will continue to lead in JTAG structural test while developing open
embedded instrumentation solutions.
This is a natural transition for Asset because we ve actually been
involved with embedded test and diagnostic technologies ever since we
helped develop the boundary-scan standard and the marketplace back in
the mid-1990s, Woppman said. Now, because of advancements in chips and
circuit boards, embedded instrumentation is emerging as the most viable
and efficient way to perform design validation, test and debug. In
general, the trajectory of the industry has been moving toward
non-intrusive methodologies for more than 15 years, ever since boundary
scan technology came on the scene. Embedding instrumentation is the
next logical step and over the last several years we have been
migrating ScanWorks into a role as an open platform for embedded
instrumentation, including boundary scan, CPU-emulation functional
test, Intel IBIST and others.
Since its very beginning, the electronics industry has used standalone,
external instruments like oscilloscopes and logic analyzers to validate
and test chips, circuit boards and systems. Invariably, these devices
relied upon physical probes to determine what was happening
electrically on chips and boards. During the 1980s, virtual
instrumentation was introduced. This concept leveraged the PC as the
computing platform and featured internal software drivers with virtual
front panels that controlled external instruments for test and
measurement purposes. Unfortunately, physically probing, which
instruments depend upon for access, has become difficult or ineffective
in many instances.
Now, chip manufacturers are responding with embedded instrumentation to
meet their own needs. These same embedded instruments can be re-used by
system designers, validation engineers and test engineers, who require
a more effective and agile way to validate designs, and test and debug
circuit boards and systems. In a non-intrusive way through an open
external platform, Asset s ScanWorks automates, accesses and analyzes
the instruments that have been embedded into chips.
((Comments on this story may be sent to newsdesk@closeupmedia.com))
((Distributed on behalf of 10Meters via M2 Communications Ltd -
http://www.m2.com))
((10Meters - http://www.10meters.com))
Copyright ? 2008 Wireless News
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