XJTAG demos boundary scan benefits at FPGAworld

The company will also be manning a stand at the conference on the same day in Stockholm, and in Copenhagen on September 14^t.

Simon Payne, XJTAG CEO said, “All FPGAs have boundary scan built in, but many engineers don’t realise how it can help them. FPGAworld 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.”

FPGAworld is an international conference for engineers working with FPGAs, and acts as a forum for discussion and networking. 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 FPGAworld as well as being available at an exhibition booth 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 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 explained, “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.