High-volume manufacturers like Jabil, Lucent, Tellabs and Raytheon/ODS have all realized significant cost savings as well as other business efficiencies as a result of migrating boundary-scan tests from the design phase of a product’s life cycle to manufacturing. In fact, a Lucent quantitative study found that one business unit within the firm saved approximately $1 million because it was able to re-use JTAG tests developed to validate and debug a design in its manufacturing environment on Agilent 3070 in-circuit test systems.
Other companies, like Tellabs, turned to combining boundary-scan test with ICT out of necessity. By failing to derive test coverage greater than 40 percent with some circuit boards on an ICT tester, Tellabs was led to a combined ICT/boundary-scan methodology. The resulting savings in terms of greater efficiencies, faster time-to-market and reduced costs for ICT test fixtures helped ScanWorks pay for itself in short order.
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