Refine Your Search

Search Results

Journal Article

Adaptive Test System to Improve PCB Testing in the Automotive Industry

2013-04-08
2013-01-1230
This paper presents an adaptive test approach to improve the structural testing of printed circuit boards (PCB) found in electronic automotive components. The approach makes use of FPGAs available on the PCBs, and its applicability is supported by the global trend taking place in the automotive industry of replacing ASICs with programmable devices such as FPGAs. For structural testing of PCBs, Boundary Scan (BScan) is mostly used. However, BScan has the disadvantage of being a static test method due to the slow execution speed reducing the fault coverage concerning dynamic faults. FPGAs support BScan as well, but they also offer a vast number of programmable resources. These resources can be configured for testing purposes. Our approach is to speed-up the testing process during the PCB manufacturing by moving data intensive processing from the external software side (Test-PC) to the programmable hardware side on-board (FPGA), reducing the data transfer over the slow JTAG interface.
X