Webster commits to ScanWorks
For the last eight years, or back to ScanWorks Version 2.2, Jim Webster, principal engineer at defense systems supplier, BAE Systems, in Edinburgh, Scotland, has been a staunch supporter of ASSET. His commitment has led him to become an active participant in the ScanWorks Users Group.
“The way I look at it is if you’re going to commit to a company and its technology, like ASSET and ScanWorks, then you’ve got to get involved if you want to get the most out of it,” Jim said.
 His involvement with boundary scan began in 1997 when, he says, enough semiconductor devices included the technology to make it worthwhile.
“Part of my job is to keep an eye on new test technologies that will have an effect on our business,” he explained. “I had been aware of boundary scan for a while and then when it had been integrated into enough silicon, I started evaluating tools for using it, such as ScanWorks.”
Webster came around to boundary scan because of the escalating costs associated with board test. “Around 1997, board test was very expensive,” he said. “The only way we could do it was in-circuit test (ICT) or functional tests and both these methods took a long time to develop tests and a long time to apply those tests. Sometimes we’d spend half a day running functional tests on a board.”
Webster knew that eventually he would have to educate others in his company on the benefits of JTAG test.
“We knew that if we didn’t sell the product designers at BAE Systems on boundary scan, we weren’t going to get much out of it,” he said. “So we set up a meeting and did some education and convinced them.”
His sales job was so successful that the design engineers not only incorporated boundary scan into each new circuit board, but they also designed in boundary-scan capabilities at the system-level. In many of BAE Systems’s new systems, all of the circuit boards that make up the system included a boundary-scan gateway device from Texas Instruments called the Addressable Scan Port and the scan chains on each board are routed to the system’s main test connector. Because of this foresight, all of the boards can be tested at the system level by boundary scan from one connector. In addition to BAE Systems’s design group, the deployment of ScanWorks also has spread to the company’s manufacturing operations as well.
 Webster’s involvement in the ScanWorks User Group goes back several years to a meeting at the International Test Conference where he made a presentation to other ScanWorks users. He’s also persisted in posting comments to the ASSET online bulletin board.
“I just believe things like ASSET’s online forum ought to be used more,” Webster said. “It comes in very handy, for example, when you can ask a user community if anyone has experience with a certain device. If someone has some information others could use, why not share it? It would be a waste of time for me to repeat what someone else has already done.”
Recently, Webster has submitted several device models to ASSET’s online model library where others in the ScanWorks community can access them. He plans to submit more models in the future, when he’s had a chance to verify their accuracy.
As far as the future of boundary scan goes, Webster sees the technology evolving into new segments and touching on new functions. Systems-on-chip (SOC) and mixed-signal or hybrid devices are two areas where he thinks boundary scan can play a significant role.
“I think we’ll see boundary scan expanding naturally into more types of devices and new uses,” he said. “That’s what has happened in the past, so I think it will continue to expand. And the addition of new standards that depend upon boundary scan, like IEEE 1149.4 for analog testing and IEEE 1532 for in-system programming, will also continue the trend of boundary scan’s expansion.”
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