September 2023
www.us -
tech.com
www.xjtag.com PE Fiberoptics
Page 87
Fibre Optic Equipment Specialist Cuts Test Time Using XJTAG “
PE Fiberoptics is a world leader in the design, manufacture, and supply of scientific instruments for testing and characterising optical fibres and fibre-optic cables. Its systems are used by leading manufacturers for quality control around the globe, from testing new fibre designs in R&D to production testing of optical fibres in manufacturing plants, and checking the performance of installed telecommunications networks.
One of the complex PCBAs
used in its equipment has an FPGA, memories, DACs, ADCs, LAN modules, RS485 transceivers, and devices with serial busses such as I2C. Testing these boards when they arrived from the PCBA manufacturing service consumed a lot of time, especially when a board proved to be faulty and required debugging. The team needed to find a more efficient way of testing.
They settled on using XJTAG’s
boundary scan test system, and chose the Test Developer Pro integrated development environment, with an XJLink2 JTAG controller to connect to the PCBA being tested. Senior Design Engineer Nigel Berrie said, “Our choice of solution was based on the first impression of the interfaces and capabilities of XJTAG’s tools compared to the alternatives.” The team liked how easy it was to generate the basic tests automatically from the board’s design data, and how the system is also able to provide more sophisticated tests, such as using loopbacks to test the board’s transceivers, and to use the DACs to drive the ADCs.
Advertorial XJTAG’s software automatically
creates an interconnect test using information about the circuit that’s provided when the project is set up. The test toggles all the pins it can control to search for opens and shorts across the board. One advantage of this boundary scan test is the speed with which it executes; another is that it monitors all accessible nets, wherever they are on the board, and is therefore able to detect shorts between unrelated parts of the circuit, something functional tests can easily miss.
opinion a debug tool.”
anufacturer as a means of ensuring good build quality… without having to make a huge investment in manual tests at their facility.
” m“We have the intention of making it available to our PCBA ” Because PE Fiberoptics has the
full software suite, they benefitted, not just from the way the tests could rapidly be created and used, but also from the XJAnalyser functionality, which simplifies board debugging by allowing individual JTAG-enabled pins to be controlled and monitored. “We were impressed by its capabilities for testing and as a debug tool,” Berrie said.
The team was so pleased with
the XJTAG tests that they now plan to make them available to their PCBA manufacturer. Berrie explained, “It should be simple for our PCBA service provider to use it as a tool for early detection of problems. XJTAG’s tools allow low-skilled testing of manufacturing quality before the PCBs get farther down the production chain into Calibration
Nigel Berrie Senior Design Engineer PE Fiberoptics
uality before the PCBs get farther down the production chain into Calibration and System Test.
“We were impressed by XJTAG’s capabilities for testing and as q“XJTAG’s tools allow low-skilled testing of manufacturing
and System Test.” The engineers are also looking forward to not receiving faulty boards. Berrie said, “We have the intention of making it available to our PCBA manufacturer as a means of ensuring good build quality before they ship boards to us – without having to make a huge investment in manual tests at their facility.”
” They were very pleased with
their decision to choose XJTAG. “We couldn’t have done better,” concluded Berrie.
® When PE Fiberoptics adopted XJTAG’s boundary scan test tools, its engineering team was able to cut the
time taken to test the most critical parts of their valuable and complex PCBAs to just thirty seconds. Originally, engineers had needed to spend several hours manually testing each board.
Data Bank
Company PFO Instruments (trading as PE Fiberoptics) part of Judges Scientific plc.
Nature of Designer & manufacturer of business
Main products
optoelectronics test instruments Test and measurement equipment
for optical fibre and fibre-optic cable characterisation
Customers Global optical fibre manufacturers Founded
2005
Employees 16 Location Wokingham, England Web site
www.pfoinstruments.com
www.xjtag.com
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96
