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Success Stories

Qlogic rates ScanWorks JTAG system "the best!"

Miles Nelson, test engineer for Qlogic, Aliso Viejo, Calif., wanted to find the best JTAG test and in-system programming environment available. He methodically tried some of the boundary scan products he could find and came to an emphatic conclusion.

"ASSET is the best JTAG system out there," Nelson asserted. "I've really liked it and I've used a few of the competitors too. I've evaluated them and there's no comparison. The graphical user interface (GUI) on ASSET's ScanWorks™ JTAG system is not only easy to use and fast, but it saves a lot of time by doing things for you automatically, such as boundary scan interconnect testing."

Qlogic makes Fibre Channel switches, PCI host bus adapters, controller silicon and management chips for systems and peripherals that are used in storage area networks (SANs). With the advent of the Internet and the exploding need for online storage, Qlogic's products have become increasingly complex and sophisticated in recent years. Because of its innovative design and high-quality systems, the company has become a leader in its field and its products are now integrated into more than 200 OEM solutions. And Nelson's test strategy has come to include JTAG test methods and ASSET's ScanWorks.

"On one of our boards, for example, we have an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) that we designed and it's in a ball grid array (BGA) package," Nelson explained. "This ASIC has over 500 pins and it's very difficult to test whether or not it has been assembled on the board correctly. We couldn't test it if we didn't have the ScanWorks JTAG system. And our future products are going to be even harder to test. One printed circuit board (PCB) that's in development has six BGAs and they are all interconnected."

Nelson is admittedly somewhat biased toward ASSET's ScanWorks. He used the boundary scan system where he worked prior to coming to Qlogic a year and a half ago. Now he's making believers out of his colleagues at Qlogic.

"We're still not using all of the JTAG capabilities of ScanWorks," Nelson said. "Right now we're using it to assure the integrity of boundary scan chains as well as to do several other infrastructure tests. Basically, we use it to troubleshoot and isolate faults on boards that fail on the manufacturing line or come back from the field. We have plans to expand the JTAG interconnect tests that ScanWorks does and we're considering asking our contract manufacturer to use it to do in-system programming via boundary scan for some of the programmable logic on our boards."

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