ASSET InterTech provides unique tools for accessing embedded instrumentation: Boundary Scan, CPU Emulation, Intel® IBIST.

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Improved Product Quality

Plummeting yields and increasing failure rates send up red flags for OEMs and contract manufacturers. The ScanWorks JTAG system has provided a solution for both small and large companies who are intent on improving the quality of the product they shipped.

ADC, for example, saw its yields on a lot of 50 circuit boards drop to 10-60 percent. With ScanWorks and by implementing boundary scan tests, yields soared past 90 percent. Mercury, the defense supplier, was searching for an efficient way to deal with failed boards. ScanWorks and its JTAG capabilities was the answer. Although not a high-volume supplier, Digidesign’s circuit boards for its video editing equipment were complex, dense and expensive. Recovering the cost of a failed board was an imperative that ScanWorks provided.

As a start-up, Neoscale couldn't afford to ship product that wasn't of the highest quality, but it couldn't afford for its personnel to spend hours or days debugging boards. And SMT, a contract manufacturer, faced unacceptable failure rates on certain complex boards. Combining ScanWorks' boundary-scan capabilities with Agilent's 3070 ICT systems was the solution.

Success Stories

ADC Telecom
"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." Read more>

Digidesign
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." Read more>

Mercury Computer Systems
ASSET Helps Mercury Implement JTAG Test With Boundary Scan. "ASSET speeds up the isolation of interconnect faults, and that saves a lot time." Read more>

NeoScale Systems
The ScanWorks® JTAG system tracks down faults missed by other test methods. For a start-up electronic company like NeoScale Systems, Inc., a provider of enterprise storage security solutions, time is of the essence. That's why NeoScale is making full use of ASSET's ScanWorks JTAG test and programming system. Read more>

SMT Unlimited
When contract manufacturer SMT Unlimited L. P. ran into a high failure rate on a densely populated telecommunications board, Hom-Ming Chang, Vice President of Test Engineering and Information Systems, wasn't sure what he could do to solve the problem. "We really don't have boundary scan (IEEE 1149.1 JTAG) expertise on our staff here," Mr. Chang said. "So we turned to Ensure DFT to help us and they developed a test program for us that's been very successful. In one case, we've gone from having an unacceptably high failure rate to a failure rate close to zero. I'd say that was very successful." Read more>