The IEEE European Test Symposium held May 23-27 in Amsterdam provided an opportunity for Frans Mosselveld of Xcerra and Piet-Jan Kromwijk of NXP to describe the development of an automatic test-program generation tool for automotive and mixed-signal devices.
The authors report in their paper (now available for download at the Xcerra website) that the tool, aimed at customers developing test programs within the Xcerra Unison ATE programming environment, permits fast program generation while supporting the use of structured graphical tools.
“It creates the complete infrastructure of a C++ test program from a small number of simple spreadsheet files and incorporates an extensive set of library classes and tools to simplify coding and debugging,” they write. “By enforcing a clear program structure, it helps the user create a test program that can be easily maintained and extended.” The tool also automatically creates full documentation using Doxygen, a tool for generating documentation from annotated C++ sources.
The authors report that several European automotive and mixed-signal IDMs already use this tool, with NXP having achieved productivity improvements of up to 25%.