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Success Stories

ScanWorks® Saves Digidesign Time, Stress and Pain

"When a board failed our diagnostic tests, a test technician would spend all day probing it with an oscilloscope until we found where the problem was," said Chris Durocher, manufacturing engineer for Digidesign™, the leading supplier of digital audio recording and editing systems, and winner of a 2001 Technical Grammy award for work performed on the movie, The Mummy Returns. "Now that we have ASSET ScanWorks™, we know exactly where the problem is in seconds. ScanWorks saves us a lot of time, stress and pain."

Digidesign of Menlo Park, Calif, is a subsidiary of Boston-based Avid Technologies, the leader in video editing systems. Over the years, Digidesign and Avid have won several Grammies and Oscars in recognition of the contributions their systems have made to the music and movie industries. And Durocher believes that the quality of Digidsign's systems will only improve as the firm continues to deploy boundary-scan test and ScanWorks.

"We use a visual inspection system, but any system that relies on human inspection is going to be limited," Durocher explained. "With boundary scan and ScanWorks, we get the test coverage we need for our new printed circuit boards (PCBs), which are transitioning to components in advanced packages that have limited physical access. One of our new boards is very dense and crowded. ScanWorks and boundary-scan test gives us a higher level of confidence in our test coverage than we've had before."

Previously, Digidesign relied upon visual inspections techniques and in-circuit test (ICT) systems. The firm will continue to use ICT test, but it will be complemented by boundary scan test for PCBs in the future.

"The finest-pitch package we had on our older PCBs was a quad flat pack," Durocher said. "We could still make physical contact with the leads on all of the components and we got good test coverage with ICT. But our newer boards have a lot of digital signal processors (DSPs) and other components in advanced packages and, as a result, we've lost some of the testing and debugging capabilities that we had when we had physical access for ICT-based test."

To deploy boundary scan and his new ScanWorks system quickly, Durocher opted to engage the services of Ensure DFT (EDFT) Services, the design-for-test consulting subsidiary of ASSET InterTech. When he received his ScanWorks software, he also received a set of test programs developed to his specifications by Ensure DFT. After integrating ScanWorks and EDFT's test vectors with the help of ASSET's support personnel, Durocher began using his new boundary scan test capabilities on a set of boards he had just received from the firm's contract manufacturer.

"We got 14 boards in and ran our functional diagnostics on them and two failed," he said. "We put them on the ScanWorks system to see what the problem was and we found out that one of the pins on a DSP was not connected to the silicon properly. We replaced the device and the board worked great. Before we got ScanWorks, it would have taken us all day to find the problem by using an oscilloscope. With boundary scan, we can pinpoint a fault in a matter of minutes."

In the future, Durocher plans to expand his use of boundary scan by integrating ScanWorks into a manufacturing defect analysis (MDA) station on the production line. The MDA will check all of a board's nets that it can reach physically and ScanWorks will verify the remainder of the board for 100 percent test coverage.

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