Computer-aided design for testability

Many electronics manufacturing companies recognise the difficulties that exist in producing testable designs. It is a designer´s nature to think about meeting the functional specification first before considering any other design goals such as reliability, testability, manufacturability and so on. The author describes the current state of the Testability Adviser demonstrator and its operation with VISULA. One needs now to develop a fully-engineered Testability Adviser which can address a wider range of components testing problems, which has a facility for allowing test engineers to add new rules to the testability rule-base easily and which can recognise more circuit sub-functions. The Adviser also needs to be integrated with other EDA tools if a design for testability environment is to be widespread in industry. The benefits to the electronics manufacturing industry are expected to be great