Intellitech Supports Silicon Instruments through IEEE 1149.1-2013 Standard
June 17, 2013. Intellitech announced today support for accessing “Silicon Instruments” through the new IEEE 1149.1-2013 JTAG standard. The IEEE Standards Association announced the standard is available for purchase today. The new IEEE 1149.1-2013 includes structural and procedural description languages to support re-use of on-chip infrastructure IP or what Intellitech calls “Silicon Instruments.” Examples of Silicon Instruments are memory BIST, I/O BIST, logic BIST, SERDES PRBS, voltage droop monitors, and temperature monitors. The hierarchical extensions to 1149.1 Boundary Scan Description Language (BSDL) allows self-contained Silicon Instrument descriptions to be supplied by the instrument provider in a new package file format. These descriptions can then be instantiated and connected together via new capabilities of 1149.1-2013 that use the IEEE 1500 “Standard for Embedded Core Test” standard. Hierarchical documentation called Procedural Description Language (PDL), based on the open source Tcl, allows the Silicon Instrument vendor to describe the necessary steps to operate the instrument via the JTAG Test Access Port.
“Intellitech has been a pioneer in the use of 1149.1 with Silicon Instruments. We provided the fundamental groundwork in the late 1990s for many of the concepts now incorporated in 1149.1-2013 such as re-usable internal register definitions, mnemonics and the use of Tcl for JTAG test procedures. Until just a few years ago, many vendors were focused on just the boundary-scan half of the 1149.1 standard,” said CJ Clark, CEO of Intellitech and the IEEE 1149.1 Working Group chairperson. “Naturally, Intellitech continues to maintain our leadership position with 1149.1-2013 support in our JAF and PT100Pro production testers. We are also delighted that our business model enables us to offer NEBULA as a freely downloadable 1149.1-2013 software tool,” Clark continued. “An engineer with a low cost USB based JTAG controller from an FPGA vendor and Intellitech's NEBULA software can start communicating with a chip in the lab, or start developing 1149.1-2013 packages for his or her own IP.”
See related article, “IEEE 1149.1-2013 aims to slash costs through test reuse.”