Last week iNEMI (the International Electronics Manufacturing Initiative) concluded its nine-month project investigating Built-In Self-Test (BIST). The purpose of the iNEMI Project was to develop and promote the adoption of chip BIST at the board and system level. ASSET staffers participated in the Project, as part of our embedded instrumentation initiative and our drive to standardize IC BIST using technologies such as IEEE P1687 (IJTAG). Here's a summary of the conclusions…
For those of you who may be unfamiliar with this initiative, iNEMI is a consortium of over 70 electronics manufacturing and supplier companies. Its mission is to forecast and accelerate improvements in the electronics manufacturing industry for a sustainable future. You can read more about them at www.inemi.org and the BIST Project Statement of Work is available here.
Among the companies participating in the BIST Project were ASSET, Cisco, Dell, HP, Huawei and Intel. The main deliverable of the project was a survey on BIST which had about 140 respondents. Although the survey results are only available to iNEMI members, here’s a snapshot of the Project conclusions:
- I/O, Memory, and Logic BIST are seen as having significant benefits for board test engineers.
- Most chip BIST has IC vendor-proprietary access and control, which inhibits wider adoption and implementation at the board test level.
- A combination of boundary scan and BIST is seen as addressing the diminishing test access issue of in-circuit testing for assembly defects.
- Standards that leverage off of the JTAG TAP, such as IEEE P1687, are expected to be key in achieving board test coverage and diagnostics granularity improvements.
iNEMI is considering a further Phase 2 of this project to target BIST education and promotion, standards promotion, and standards gaps.
