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Success Stories

ScanWorks® reduces Tellabs JTAG and ICT costs while improving board quality

Vivace Networks, which was recently acquired by Tellabs, Inc., of Naperville, IL, makes very complex circuit boards with more than 9,000 nodes, ball grid array (BGA) and micro-BGA devices with more than 400 pins, 32 layers per board and numerous application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) with as many as 1,247 pins. Besides the fact the new division of Tellabs could only get 40 percent test coverage on such a board, producing in-circuit test (ICT) fixtures to thoroughly test boards like this was proving to be a very expensive and time consuming proposition.

"We knew we were going to have to use JTAG testing and ICT in combination," explained Director of Manufacturing Engineering Dan Howley. "We started to sort through our designs to identify everything that could be tested by JTAG technology and we discovered that we would be able to eliminate more than two-thirds of all the test points on our typical boards. And if you compare the cost of producing an ICT test fixture with all of the possible test points and the cost of a fixture with two-thirds fewer test points, you'd see that the cost difference is very significant. You save approximately $40,000 to $60,000 per fixture."

"On the basis of cost savings from ICT fixtures alone, to say nothing about our improved product quality, ASSET's ScanWorks boundary scan test and programming system has paid for itself several times over and we've been using it for less than a year. In addition, there are hard-to-calculate savings, like the significant time and cost savings that the ScanWorks JTAG system makes possible during the fabrication of the printed circuit board itself. And there's no way we can figure out the reduced opportunity costs that we've enjoyed by bringing our products to market faster than we otherwise could have done. These cost savings are immeasurable, and they probably far exceed what we've saved on ICT fixtures."

Time-to-market is one of the most critical factors that Tellabs faces. Its product line consists of broadband fiber optic Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) equipment for transport applications over the public telephone network and the Internet. The group within Tellabs that can with the Vivace acquisition places great emphasis on reducing the time it takes to ready new designs for the market.

"The ScanWorks JTAG system helps us bring up tests very quickly so that the design engineers don't have to wait long to see how a new design is going to function," said Senior Test Engineer Rick Harper. "The boundary scan technology in ScanWorks has shaved as much as three or four weeks off of the prototype verification process for each board. This has really won over the design group. It's gotten to the point where the design engineers come to me early in the design process and ask me to help them put as much JTAG test into their designs as possible. They realize how valuable boundary scan is."

Harper came to Vivace and Tellabs from 3Com, where one of his responsibilities was to evaluate the various JTAG benchtop test systems. He chose ASSET InterTech's ScanWorks for Tellabs. Since the company uses Agilent 3070 ICT systems in its manufacturing line, the firm could re-use ScanWorks boundary-scan tests on the 3070, reducing ICT test development time.

"The versatility of the ScanWorks JTAG system is good. We can use it to test voltages as low as 1.8 V and that is very useful to us," Mr. Harper explained. "The ease-of-use of ScanWorks and its boundary scan technology is also very good and the support people have been very helpful. Having local support was a big plus for us."

About Tellabs

Tellabs provides innovative bandwidth management solutions to help telecommunications carriers around the world move communications most efficiently and effectively. The world communicates through Tellabs™ —most telephone calls and Internet sessions in several countries, including the United States, flow through the company's equipment. Tellabs employee-owners develop and deploy solutions that provide aggregation, grooming and business services in metro/regional networks in more than 100 countries (NASDAQ: TLAB; tellabs.com).

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