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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 [email protected])) ((Distributed on behalf of 10Meters via M2 Communications Ltd - http://www.m2.com)) ((10Meters - http://www.10meters.com)) Copyright ? 2008 Wireless News |