Development of on-line BISTed structures for distributed systems in the framework of the concurrent engineering environment.
- Duration: 2000-2001
- Coordinator: Politecnico di Torino
- Partners: Politecnico di Torino and Technical University of Cluj Napoca
- Funded by: CRITC under Leonardo Projects
Concurrent engineering is a systematical approach to a product’s concurrent and integrated design and related processes, including manufacturing and maintenance. All the elements of the life cycle of a product, from its specification to its destruction, including quality, costs’ pro-gramming and users’ needs, are to be considered when the product is developed [Institute for Defense Analyses, USA].
Concurrent engineering comprises a sum of conditions which must be taken into account in the development of a system, that is: achievement of specified performances, verifiabil-ity, reliability, maintainability, testability, manufacturability, integrability, generically re-ferred to as X-ability.
The emerging of the concurrent engineering concept is a consequence of unprecedented devel-opment of Microelectronics and Information Technology, continuous increase of systems’ inte-gration degree, miniaturization and development of systems which are more and more complex and integrated, and establishment of higher and higher quality and reliability demands.
A particular place within the framework of concurrent engineering is the concern with devel-opment of methods, techniques, technologies and equipment for electronic products’ automated testing, with a view to providing for their quality and reliability.
The main trend is the use of Information Technology in testing and qualitative control activity. New approaches have appeared, correspondingly to this trend: development of design techniques for automated testing, development of testing techniques for distributed systems, increase of dis-crete critical systems availability by providing for fault tolerance, systems diagnosis using visual inspection. These approaches materialize in researches within the framework of European Pro-grams and in appearance of new equipment manufactured according to new concepts.
We propose a structure where each component of the distributed system (excepting communi-cation media) is doubled by a testing module. The master and slave testing modules have different functions.
The master testing module is a software module. As its name suggests, it will play the role of master in testing activity. It has two major jobs to accomplish: the first is to test and verify mas-ter device regular activity, and the second is to lead testing activity in the slave device and to gather resulting data.
Slave testing module is a mixed module: it consists of a hardware side and a software side. We will try to take advantage of the fact that almost all programmable components manufactured today comply with boundary scan architecture. Hardware side is based on boundary-scan architecture, with an extension: it also contains a logic circuit that makes this architecture re-configurable, so that it can be used for on-line testing. The software side of the slave module (that implements the test controller) will also make use of existent communication driver modules that are used for regular system functions. The slave testing module also has two activities: first of them is to communicate with the master testing module (that is, to receive commands and test vectors for external test, and to send back test results), and second is to coordinate testing of slave device according to the commands received. This slave testing module must be implement-ed by hardware, in case of non-intelligent slave devices.