Digital Test Engineering

Book excerpt: Test engineering has emerged as a crucial sub-profession of electrical engineering. This volume enables the practicing engineer or advanced student to acquire the knowledge to select a test strategy to match the product and the tools to carry out the strategy in accordance with performance requirements. Containing information not readily gained except through hard experience, this book covers the sequence of events encountered in most digital test development efforts where the test subjects are circuit boards or integrated circuits. Chapters provide general background on the subject; explore the alternatives for deriving a test program (stimulus generation, expected response generation, and circuit and fault modeling); and cover options in applying the test to the product, including automatic test equipment, device-under-test interface, ATE languages, aids to diagnostics, and troubleshooting. The closing chapter gives a managerial perspective for the engineer who expects to exercise the full range test responsibilities.