Two embedded instrumentation<br>experts join ASSET

Al Crouch, former chief scientist and director of DFx research and development at Inovys and Verigy has joined ASSET as Chief Technologist, Core Instrumentation. Mr. Crouch has served for the last three years as vice chairman of the P1687 IJTAG working group that is developing the IJTAG standard and has contributed significantly to the hardware architecture definition. Over the last 20 years, he has accumulated experience in chip design-for-test at both Freescale Semiconductor (formerly Motorola) and Texas Instruments. Mr. Crouch has filed for more than 30 patents and been granted 15. John Potter, formerly the principal automation architect at Inovys and an engineering supervisor at Motorola has joined ASSET’s IJTAG tools development effort as Senior Principal Technologist, Core Instrumentation. Mr. Potter is also a more recent member of the P1687 IJTAG working group focusing on the language portion. Over the last 18 years in the electronics industry, he has filed for four patents and been granted two. Additionally, ASSET InterTech is developing open embedded instrumentation tools based on the preliminary IEEE standard, P1687 Internal JTAG. According to Glenn Woppman, president and CEO of ASSET, the standard is close enough to ratification to begin developing tools. “Electronics manufacturers are realizing that the external design validation, test and debug technologies which they have now are simply running out of gas,” said Woppman. “As a result, chip vendors as well as the system manufacturers themselves are embedding instruments into silicon. Now, both the chip vendors and system suppliers need open tools to work with these embedded instruments. For the sake of efficiency and agility, these tools must be able to manage embedded instruments from any chip vendor.”