TelStrat turns to ScanWorks for complex device testing.
With more BGAs on-board, ScanWorks plays an essential role
Les Bowling’s timing was impeccable. Two years ago, Les, a test engineer for TelStrat, implemented ScanWorks and boundary-scan test operations looking to improve test and diagnostics capability. He was dealing with a few complex devices on several densely populated circuit boards at the time. Since then complex devices in ball grid array (BGA) packages have come to dominate most of the telecom manufacturer’s newer designs.
“ScanWorks has made a significant difference in how we perform diagnostics and troubleshooting. Diagnostics and troubleshooting would be more difficult if we didn’t have ScanWorks,” Les said.
In particular, TelStrat’s line of broadband loop carrier systems features cards with many BGAs and high-speed complex architectures. The company’s innovative Inteleflex® broadband loop carrier platform enables telecommunication providers who serve smaller cities and rural markets to bridge today’s circuit-switched networks and emerging packet-based services to deliver converged voice, data and video communication, and entertainment service.
Before deploying ScanWorks, TelStrat’s test engineers and technicians spent many man-hours using various test technologies to diagnose and troubleshoot structural manufacturing faults.
“ScanWorks has allowed us to test, troubleshoot, and diagnose complex systems quickly without spending many hours on test and diagnostic software development,” Les explained.
Once the decision for boundary-scan testing was made, TelStrat incorporated several PC-based ScanWorks stations with USB-100 controllers into its manufacturing and repair operations.
“ScanWorks greatly reduced the amount of time we spend on diagnostic development,” Les said. “ScanWorks has allowed us to access ‘buried’ interconnection nets on our circuit boards, which link multiple BGA devices. This provides us the ability to effectively troubleshoot and diagnose failures in a short period of time.”
TelStrat has employed ScanWorks for interconnect test as well as memory access verification (MAV) testing on production assemblies and circuit boards that have been returned from the field.
“Our role is in manufacturing, but from time to time our engineering group will call on us to build a boundary-scan test to figure out a problem very quickly,” he explained. “The boundary-scan access varies from design to design; however, no matter what percent of test coverage we yield, we find ScanWorks’ ability to diagnose and troubleshoot very helpful.”
As Bowling looks to the future, he sees an increasing proliferation of BGAs and other hard-to-access devices, and that means an expanding role for ScanWorks and boundary-scan test. In fact, several of TelStrat’s new designs incorporate high-speed AC-coupled differential buses, which are tested with ScanWorks. Several years ago, ScanWorks was the first boundary-scan system to support the IEEE 1149.6 standard for testing high-speed serial I/O buses. |
