Increasing design automation requires an appreciation for the challenges incurred and complexities involved at every stage of product development. EDA tools targeting complete product design offer many benefits, including the ability to increase functionality through extensions and plug-ins. Robert Huxel, Technical Marketing Manager, Altium and Philip Ling, Technical Marketing Manager, XJTAG explain.

The XJTAG DFT Assistant for Altium Designer will be officially unveiled at Embedded World 2016, Nuremberg (February 23-25). Developed by XJTAG, the free software extension for Altium Designer significantly increases the Design for Test capabilities of the unified schematic capture and PCB design system.

Version 3.4 of XJTAG’s Development System introduces major improvements in the visibility into complex systems during all phases of electronic product development and manufacture. As it becomes increasingly difficult to physically access the fine-pitch arrays of modern integrated devices, engineers must rely on alternative solutions to debugging and testing complex circuits.

Major new features of the XJTAG Development System including Log File Viewer and Waveform Viewer will be on parade at productronica in Munich (November 10-14).  Working in conjunction with XJTAG’s production test environment, XJRunner, Log File Viewer bridges the gap between the design domain and the production test environment by allowing test engineers to capture vital fault diagnosis and convey it back to design teams, enabling effe...

The focus of the latest software update from XJTAG is on increasing the flexibility of JTAG chain control to make it easier for engineers to access the full JTAG capabilities of their boards and so achieve maximum test coverage. Dynamic chain profiling makes it easier to initialise boards with multiple JTAG chains, in which a device in one JTAG chain controls power supplies or reset lines for JTAG devices in the other chains.

XJTAG has pepped up flash programming. XJFlash allows engineers to automatically generate customised programming solutions that can overcome the speed limitations generally associated with using boundary scan to program flash memories connected to FPGAs. It enables up to 50 times faster flash programming.