September 2026
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Page 71 TESTING TIMES The
‘The F word’ stands for ‘Failed’ – because when a circuit fails without explanation, everything stops. Development halts, deadlines slip, and engineers are left searching in the dark for answers. When your test process can’t tell why something
failed, it slows everything down. Multiple engineers, hours of troubleshooting, and high rework costs all just to find one faulty component. But what if you could locate that failure in minutes? That’s exactly what one manufacturer achieved when they switched to smarter testing.
The Problem Traditional testing only told their team if a product passed or occurred,
failed – not why. When a failure engineers
faced long, frustrating
debugging sessions. In one example, a bad signal issue consumed 40 hours of
troubleshooting by
multiple employees. The actual fault? A single component that boundary-scan testing could have found instantly at the PCB level.
The Turning Point
By integrating advanced boundary-scan testing early in their process, the team gained visibility that traditional
testing couldn’t deliver. Instead of
waiting until system-level testing to find problems, they started catching issues at the board level – before final assembly. That change didn’t just save time, it cut costs once
dramatically. What required dozens of
engineering hours can now be done by one operator in under an hour.
Advertorial F
The Insight Integrating boundary-scan doesn’t
intelligently and prevent Word
Pinpointing Faults Faster: How One Tech Company Found Component Failures in Minutes – Not Hours
By Simon Payne, Founder, President & CEO, XJTAG
Why It Works Advanced boundary-scan gives access to the hidden pins beneath BGAs and densely populated boards, where traditional test methods can’t reach. It allows engineers to run interconnect tests without needing extra test points, probing, or X-ray inspection. The system can test a wide range of devices,
from CPUs, FPGAs, RAM, flash and ADCs/DACs to I/O expanders, clock buffers, and bus interfaces like I²C, SPI and PCIe. There is an extensive device library and automated setup made it easy to deploy in their existing environment.
The Result • Fault isolation reduced from dozens of hours to under one hour • Debugging done by a single operator, not multiple engineers • Problems caught before final product assembly • Substantial savings in engineering time and rework costs
As their hardware lead explained how advance boundary scan “saves hours of troubleshooting by pinpointing the faulty component causing the failure.”
just enhance
test coverage, it transforms your entire workflow. Instead of chasing failures reactively, engineers can test
reaching production. If you’re still relying solely on functional tests, it might be time to add the precision of advanced
See at SMTA Guadalajara, Booth 144
boundary-scan to your toolkit. If your design includes JTAG-enabled devices,
the test capability is already built into the hardware – boundary-scan software is what unlocks it and turns it into a powerful tool for board-level test and fault diagnosis.
Final Note Boundary-scan isn’t
just a testing option, it’s a
decision that can shape every stage of your product’s journey, from first prototype to full-scale manufacture. By integrating boundary-scan early, you can
strengthen your test process while reducing the time and cost of finding faults later. The most effective strategy combines complementary test methods to maximize fault coverage and confidence. Whether you’re testing CPUs, FPGAs, memory,
interfaces, or other complex electronics, advanced boundary-scan gives greater visibility into faults traditional
testing may struggle to isolate. By
identifying problems at board level, before final assembly, you can turn hours of troubleshooting into faster, targeted fault diagnosis.
Take the Next Step See how boundary-scan can strengthen your testing and reliability. You can try XJTAG for free with your own board as a quick way to see the faults your
functional tests may have missed. them from Go to
www.xjtag.com for more info.
Follow Simon Payne, CEO of XJTAG on Linkedin:
linkedin.com/in/simon-payne-xjtag
www.xjtag.com
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