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Success Stories

Yields Soar With Use Of ASSET On Multimedia Telecommunications Boards

"Our boards have no in-circuit testing (ICT) capability due to extremely high chip density," said John Howard, manufacturing manager for the BATG Division of ADC Telecom Inc., in Cleveland, OH. "There was no room for test points and physical access to the fine pitch pins is very limited. It was taking us up to a month to test, troubleshoot and bring up a batch of 50 boards. With the testability services we've received from ASSET InterTech's Ensure DFT Division, as well as our contractors use of the ASSET boundary scan test and in-system programming system, we can now bring up a batch of boards in hours versus days."

The BATG Division makes multimedia boards for ADC's telecommunications systems. The boards are capable of transmitting and receiving audio, data and video communications. In addition, the division makes a number of network interface cards for ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) transport over public and private broadband networks.

"For each board, we take the netlist, schematic, boundary-scan description language (BSDL) files and a description of the boundary-scan chain, and we provide these to Ensure DFT. They generate tests that are used by our contract manufacturers," Mr. Howard said. "Typically, the BSDL-enabled chips only provide 45 to 50 percent test coverage with boundary scan, but we've seen our yields increase dramatically."

Before ADC began requiring that its contract manufacturers use tests generated by the boundary-scan experts at Ensure DFT, the company's yield on a batch of boards would vary anywhere from 10 to 60 percent. The yield on the company's latest batch of 200 of its "Videopoint" printed circuit board assemblies was 92.5% during functional test.

"In the past, we would frequently receive boards in and expect to have multiple problems on each board to troubleshoot and fix," Mr. Howard explained. "Now, we often don't have a single problem on a board because the contract manufacturer has already tested them with test programs generated by Ensure DFT. Using Ensure DFT to advise us and generate our tests and using the ASSET boundary-scan test system to run the tests at our contractor has reduced the number of variables we have to deal with. And that has simplified our lives significantly."

Mr. Howard has been so impressed with the capabilities of the ASSET system that he is installing it in his own facility so that ADC Telecom's technicians can use it as another troubleshooting tool.

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