Watching a product mature is a great experience. Working with ScanWorks for over 15 years has provided a unique opportunity to assist in the maturation process from a point solution to that of a platform. Most of my experience has been in taking business opportunities and developing other tools that start out addressing a customer or niche market needs. These adventures almost always end in a point tool. After product deployment and working with more and more customers, the product evolves to the point but, too often there it is still missing a little something. Then looking at the products in-house you find the missing piece. By extending an interface here and there, you begin to see how to integrate tools together within the architecture and that provide a much better problem-solving solution and better user experience. ScanWorks had evolved to a world-class boundary scan test tool. To make it better, it needed to evolve into a platform where other tools could interface using the same target connection infrastructure, JTAG. Here are examples of two such point tools that are being integrated within ScanWorks. These and other features make ScanWorks a world-class tool and platform by enabling functional test and FPGA embedded instruments.
