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Board bring up of an early prototype is one of the most important steps for a design team. The first boards must pass through a battery of tests to demonstrate that the hardware is rock-solid. Non-intrusive technologies can be used to accelerate this process.
With chip-to-chip interconnects now running at 8 GT/s and above, a new class of faults due to manufacturing and process drift is emerging. What are these faults and how are they detected?
Today I read an interesting article in Electronic Design magazine about the complexity of testing third-generation serial-data technology. With comments from Agilent, Tektronix and LeCroy, the article highlights all of the problems associated with oscilloscopes, BERTs, AWGs and other โ€œheavy-metalโ€ products, and not surprisingly doesnโ€™t say anything about the elegant alternative of using embedded instrumentationโ€ฆ
Is your laptop highly available? Maybe not yet, but... The author ruminates on why he's spending his precious weekend hours troubleshooting gadgets that should work all the time.
Tired of that old bed-of-nails? Legacy In-Circuit Test (ICT) has been diminishing in value for a long time. Letโ€™s explore some of the current technical issues with ICT as test access on new circuit board designs continues to disappear.
ScanWorks Embedded Diagnostics is embedded firmware which uses a CPUโ€™s debug port to access a systemโ€™s architecturally visible registers, memory and I/O. See the technology and benefits behind this "debugger on steroids".
ScanWorks Embedded Diagnostics for x86 systems requires a connection between the embedded service processor (BMC, FPGA or other) supporting run control and the target CPU(s). The nature of these connections is described herein.
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