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Teradyne Inc. announced at AUTOTESTCON '99 that its functional board test products fully support the recently approved IEEE digital functional test data standard: Digital Test Interchange Format (DTIF), IEEE standard (Std) 1445.

The approval of DTIF as a full IEEE standard culminates a four-year effort that involved dozens of companies representing digital test equipment suppliers, test program set (TPS) developers, and TPS users. The team worked to develop a data-exchange format that would address the problems of test program data content and format inconsistencies that have made data postprocessing difficult and test data reuse nearly impossible.

"This retargeting of data virtually eliminates the time-consuming task of developing specific test databases for specific ATE systems. Furthermore, the existence of a digital test interchange data standard means that DTIF readers and writers can be developed to move test data between TPS execution environments. A practical example of this is TPS rehosting. Standards like this one position TPSs for reusability in the future as ATE platforms are replaced or upgraded," says Dave Rolince, Teradyne's representative on the IEEE DTIF standard committee.

The Standard Advantage

The DTIF standard establishes a universal data format for digital Go/NoGo and diagnostic test data. Postprocessors can now be easily written to translate test data from any digital test program generation (DTPG) tool into DTIF, as well as from DTIF to any ATE-specific test program format. From a single standard database of simulation data, test programs can be generated for a variety of functional test platforms. By creating translators that use the DTIF standard, legacy test programs can be rehosted to modern ATE platforms.

Teradyne's LASAR, VICTORY, M9-Series, and Spectrum functional test products fully support the DTIF standard. LASAR test generation software writes DTIF files through its LSRTAP postprocessor. In the VICTORY family of boundary-scan test generation and diagnostic software, the Boundary-Scan Intelligent Diagnostics (BSID) product uses DTIF fault dictionary files for diagnosing Virtual Component and Cluster Test (VCCT) faults in non-scan clusters. The Spectrum family of functional testers with M9-Series digital test instruments import DTIF files directly for use in Go/NoGo and diagnostic test programs, eliminating the need for additional data translation.