"Our core system design is right on schedule but, as usual, the engineering touch time is delaying product shipment and increasing our costs"

What is touch time? All the infrastructure design, debugging, testing, handling, revision support and other engineering tasks that occur from product definition to final product shipment. Read about these engineering management examples:

• Valuable engineering face time is taken during the project's critical path to design and debug home-brew FPGA configuration solution. The schedule slipped and the parts cost increased
• FPGA vendors have made it so easy to design the big blocks of the system, the PCB infrastructure to make the system a viable product, is taking as much time if not more to design, route and debug.
• The engineering team lost time and beta customer confidence debugging a failed method for updating the FPGA designs in the field which didn't properly account for different silicon revisions.
• Our PCB was designed with numerous local commodity FLASH for FPGA configuration. The long download time in the lab adding to engineering time. Programming the FLASH through JTAG was too slow for the CM so they resorted to pre-programming FLASH, inventorying sufficient FLASH, and updating inventoried FLASH each time with the latest revision. The numerous FLASH and inventorying increased our material costs.
• The PCBs tested OK at the contract manufacturer but failed in the system chassis at elevated temperature - engineering time increased, daily teleconference meetings, and cost of effort increased.
• The CM was in multiple countries - each location needed to purchase multiple PC based JTAG stations and each needed on-site help with the JTAG test setup. The effort doubled when we added JTAG tests during burn-in. The production schedule slipped, costs increased.
• The CM doesn’t have time to learn the details of our system functionality so they can't trouble-shoot functional tests well, especially high-speed SERDES and DDR. The functional tests do not provide enough granularity to isolate the fault and improve the production solder process.
• The functional tests represented a high man-hour investment however they failed to identify a hardware problem in the field – lost engineering time and credibility with customer. Functional test development was a high-risk investment as there was no payoff (fault was not caught).
• Faulty PCBs were returned from the field, tested by test engineering and NTF (No Trouble Found)
• A PCB in field lost configuration during update process, it was unrecoverable without shipping it back to factory to be re-programmed.

There has got to be a better way!

SystemBIST - The programmable configuration device with JTAG control

SystemBIST uses a PC based software application and GUI enabling you to develop complex FPGA configuration methods, control of I2C/SPI devices and add in-system JTAG based manufacturing tests. The software application creates a single image of your FPGA data, test data and flow-control sequences which is then downloaded to the on-PCB SystemBIST and memory. Updates are done by examining the differences in data, creating an incremental image and erasing/programming a safe portion of the memory.

It’s not just an IC, but a whole ecosystem of software, companion ICs, downloadable IP and support services integrated to get many engineering tasks done on time and at the lowest cost. This ecosystem creates a stable, high performance re-usable solution that frees the engineers to focus on product development rather than reinventing board-level infrastructure. Use SystemBIST and reduce development costs, test engineering costs, parts costs, field service costs, schedule and logistic risks and time-to-deployment.

Feature	Benefit
IC and software is integrated for 'fail-safe' in-the-field FPGA updates	Easy to use FPGA/CPLD updating in the field
Load multiple designs into each FPGA based on PCB configuration, geographical location, FPGAs present, DSP algorithms needed, Telecom standards needed or other user definable conditions	Greater than 100% FPGA device utilization
Execute JTAG based manufacturing tests embedded with FPGA data	Pinpoint defects and opens without ATE. Provides critical data point on low-level hardware status reducing debug time. Execute tests over operating environment, during burn-in and at customer site, load test specific FPGA designs
Test/FPGA configuration results saved in non-volatile memory	Eliminates NTF returns, enables high resolution defect identification by SystemBIST application software – even for PCBs in-the-field
Load IJTAG tests for SERDES and DDR memories	Enables at-speed infrastructure tests with pinpoint diagnostics
Programmable PCB level resets	Control bring up of CPUs and FPGA
Programmable GPIO	Control DC/DC converters, LEDs, control I2C/SPI A/D or D/A
Built-in Watch-dog Timer	Reset CPU or FPGAs on ‘hang’ , reduce component count

DesignCon Booth 124, Santa Clara Convention Center , February 5-6th

Copyright (C) 2008 Intellitech Corp. All Rights Reserved. ‘Engineering Touch Time” and “Reducing your Engineering Touch Time” are trademarks of Intellitech Corp.