Barric partners with XJTAG

The boundary scan Development System meets the growing market need for a cost-effective solution for testing tightly-packed printed circuit boards populated with JTAG devices such as ball grid array (BGA) and chip scale devices, which cannot be tested by traditional methods. According to Barric, since introducing XJTAG the company has seen production yields increase significantly. "The XJTAG system is an excellent and highly versatile product which has transformed the way we test complex printed circuit boards populated with BGA devices," said Simon Bayley, technical director at Barric. "We opted for the XJTAG system ahead of competitive products due to its price, speed of development and because the technical support was excellent," added Simon Bayley. "In addition, because the test scripts are device rather than board-centric in XJTAG, we are able to reuse them on different projects - this is a major benefit for a company that manufactures numerous different board designs for multiple customers each month." "We manufacture a dozen or so different development boards for one Cambridge-based company and work closely with their designers to ensure that XJTAG is optimised to best effect," said Sarah Green, test engineer at Barric. "Using XJTAG, the designer or developer can automatically select or 'pack' all the relevant data for a particular board – BSDL files, netlists, XJEase files, pin mapping files etc. – and forward this to our production team. This streamlines the whole development process and ensures that the yields are kept high and that any recurring issues are looped back to the design stage for rectifying." Simon Payne, chief executive at XJTAG, said: "XJTAG is becoming a popular choice for contract manufacturers who are under pressure to improve yields and because of the prevalence of BGA devices on modern printed circuits need to complement their in-circuit, functional or flying probe test equipment with a cost-effective boundary scan solution."