Xcerra, NXP describe test-program tool at IEEE ETS

Sept. 2, 2016

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%.

About the Author

Rick Nelson | Contributing Editor

Rick is currently Contributing Technical Editor. He was Executive Editor for EE in 2011-2018. Previously he served on several publications, including EDN and Vision Systems Design, and has received awards for signed editorials from the American Society of Business Publication Editors. He began as a design engineer at General Electric and Litton Industries and earned a BSEE degree from Penn State.

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