Read how Corelis JTAG tools helped maintain test engineer’s sanity while increasing throughput and reducing cost at Imperial Technology Inc.

Corelis JTAG Tools Help Maintain Test Engineer’s Sanity While Increasing Throughput

Reduced Cost at Imperial Technology Inc.

“A large, double sided, very complex PC board assembly was being tested in a “hot mock-up” and was consuming seven Test Engineer hours to test, troubleshoot, and repair. This required that a high level Test Engineer be dedicated to this testing function. The repetitious testing strained his sanity and added considerable cost to the process,” said Bruce C. Johnson.

Bruce is the Quality Assurance Manager at Imperial Technology and is responsible for Inspection, Test, and Test Engineering.  Imperial Technology, located in El Segundo, California, designs and manufactures state of the art high speed, solid state disk drive memories.

In minimal time, Corelis provided a turn-key solution that included the ScanExpress boundary-scan test system and a custom test procedure.

“Our board was not particularly designed with boundary scan in mind, however test results were most gratifying” said Mr. Johnson. “All accessible failing nodes were easily identified leading to faulty parts or the failure cause. The majority of boards which passed the boundary test also passed functional testing in the hot mock-up. We are now using technicians to perform the testing and fault location using the Corelis solution, freeing the Test Engineer to perform more demanding tasks.”

“We were so pleased with the results,” added Mr. Johnson, “that we proceeded with Corelis to perform test vectors generation for two additional boards which incorporated BGA parts and a multitude of FPGA parts. Source acceptance testing located faults which the designing engineer had, unsuccessfully, devoted weeks to locate. Boards which tested GOOD using boundary scan performed 100% in subsequent system functional tests. The Corelis Boundary Scan solution has saved a substantial investment in Test Engineer and test fixturing resources. These valuable resources may now be utilized in more productive and satisfying applications.”

Mr. Johnson was so pleased with the effectiveness of boundary-scan and Corelis boundary-scan test tools, that he is incorporating boundary-scan  testability into all new product designs at Imperial Technology.

“Corelis Engineers quickly became knowledgeable with our product and efficiently generated Test Vectors with excellent test coverage. Source inspection, which included inserting many faults, was performed at the Corelis facility and successfully accomplished in a speedy and cooperative manner. Test coverage was as quoted and fault locations were well displayed. On-site training was also provided to our Test Engineer.”