Extending reach of free boundary-scan tools

EINDHOVEN, THE NETHERLANDS: JTAG Technologies announced the latest extension to its popular JTAGLive family of boundary-scan powered design and repair debug tools for PCBs. JTAGLive Buzz-plus is an extension to the acclaimed free-of-charge Buzz tool that was launched in 2009.

While Buzz allows the user to sample activity on boundary-scan pins and test continuity of nets across a circuit board - and is free to all users - Buzz-plus extends the capability with a unique ‘seek and discover’ mode; that effectively learns the network of nodes for a specified net connection.

Peter van den Eijnden, MD of JTAG, said: “We devised Buzz-plus to allow even easier detection of bridging – a.k.a. short-circuit - faults with our base-level JTAGLive family. With Buzz-plus you can find all the boundary-scan connections for two drivers simultaneously. If connections are missing, or if shorts occur between these two nets, those can easily be seen.”

Also, 99 free copies of Buzz-plus are available to existing Buzz users, who can apply via www.jtaglive.com/Products/Buzz.

The JTAGLive family capitalizes on the boundary-scan resources found on today’s high-end circuit boards. There is no need for a netlist since the tool uses just BSDL models of the compliant parts (usually freely available from IC vendors) to give the user access to all of the I/O pins for driving and sensing.

The user can define up to two boundary-scan chains and can quickly verify chain integrity through hardware adapters from Xilinx, Altera, JTAG Technologies and the dedicated JTAGLive controller/interface.

As well as the new Buzz-plus option, the JTAGLive family includes additional extended modules ‘Clip’, which allows the engineer to create more customised logic cluster test patterns, and ‘Script’, a powerful command and control structure to manipulate and sense cluster I/Os utilising the popular Python language. Script is ideal for functional-style, device-oriented tests such as testing mixed signal parts, operations that require user intervention, and looping test patterns to set up device registers.

The latest version of Script not only allows you to access the boundary-scan registers of the devices on your board, it now also allows you to access, observe and control any device register that can be accessed through the JTAG interface.