XJTAG Shows the Benefits of Boundary Scan at Evertiq Expo, Malmö
XJTAG®, a leader in JTAG boundary scan products, will be presenting a talk entitled “What is JTAG and how can JTAG help me?” at Evertiq Expo in Malmö on 23rd of May 2024 as part of the launch of version 4.0 of the XJTAG software suite. The company will also be manning a booth along with its distributor partner, Nohau Solutions, at the conference.
XJTAG 4.0 contains a number of improvements to the software, including Optimised Scans which allow different JTAG chains on a board to be run simultaneously at different clock frequencies, allowing your tests to run at their full potential, rather than being restricted by a few slower devices.
Simon Payne, XJTAG CEO said, “All FPGAs have boundary scan built in, but many engineers don’t realise how it can help them. Evertiq Expo is a great opportunity to demonstrate how the board’s JTAG connection allows engineers to use the FPGA’s boundary scan capabilities to test their board.”
Evertiq started out as a magazine covering electronics news and developments with an initial focus on the Swedish market and now holds a number of tradeshows around Europe under the banner of the Evertiq Expo. The Malmö show is the flagship expo, being set in one of Sweden’s fastest growing regions for the industry, including startups and universities.
This is a free show allowing engineers to meet their current and potential suppliers in the electronics design and manufacturing industries. The formal presentations during the day and informal discussions at the venue’s booths and over lunch or coffee give engineers the opportunity to learn from industry experts like XJTAG.
Tommaso De Vivo, XJTAG’s Vice President Business Development, EMEA, will be presenting at Evertiq Expo as well as being available at exhibition booth #63 for 1-to-1 discussions. He said, “I’ll be explaining what boundary scan is and how it allows an FPGA’s pins to be turned into virtual test points that can be read and controlled. I’ll show you how that can be used to test the board for assembly faults and to perform accelerated programming.”
One of the biggest problems with testing modern high-density PCBAs comes from the lack of physical access to points in the circuit caused by shrinking board area and the use of advanced IC packages such as BGAs. Tommaso De Vivo said, “The beauty of using boundary scan to test the board is that the reduced level of physical access no longer matters. And because you don’t need to configure the FPGA or run any code on the board, you can also use it to find out what’s wrong on boards that won’t boot.”
XJTAG’s tools provide an easy-to-use way to make the most of an FPGA’s boundary scan capabilities. Boundary scan is used by many engineers in R&D, test, and manufacturing across all industry sectors. It assists them with board bring-up as well as test and debug, and having an FPGA on the board also allows for accelerated programming of memories.
About JTAG
JTAG is an IEEE standard that was developed to address the difficulties of testing circuits that use packaging technologies such as Ball Grid Arrays and Chip Scale Packages, where solder connections aren’t accessible to traditional bed-of-nails testers. Although JTAG has since become popular for processor debug and for programming FPGAs and CPLDs, they only make use of the standard’s communications protocol. The full benefit of the JTAG standard comes from its introduction of boundary scan techniques for testing and debugging assembled boards; XJTAG’s tools give you an easy way to use those capabilities.