Thales has adopted the XJTAG system for use by development and production engineers at its Crawley, England, facility. Initially, the XJTAG system will be used to debug and test the baseband PCBs that form part of the Thales MSN 8100-H software-defined radio (SDR), which apparently is the first operational SDR in Europe. This SDR is designed for naval and ground based applications and will be used on the Royal Navy’s next class of Destroyers, the Type 45, scheduled to enter service in 2009.
The ability to program Flash memories and other non-JTAG devices was an important factor for Thales. By using XJEase (the XJTAG system’s BASIC-like test description language for manipulating non-JTAG devices), engineers had a rapid means of programming Flash memories both at the development stage and in production.
“Unlike other JTAG tools, XJEase enables circuit developers to re-use XJEase scripts in different projects,” says Gary Delamare, “This portability is really valuable and is not available with ordinary programming tools which tend to be tied to one particular processor.”
The XJTAG Development System is designed to cut the cost and shorten the development cycle of electronic products and can test JTAG as well as non-JTAG devices. XJTAG can test a high proportion of a circuit including ball grid array (BGA) and chip scale devices, SDRAMs, Ethernet controllers, video interfaces, Flash memories, FPGAs, microprocessors and others as well as supporting. in-system programming of FPGAs, Complex Programmable Logic Devices (CPLDs) and Flash memories.
The XJTAG system is also being used by Thales‚ contract manufacturing partner.