Entering Board Information into XJDeveloper

 

For a boundary scan system to perform tests, it requires information about the board being checked. At the most basic level, for example, it must know which pins it can safely drive and where any resulting signal changes can be monitored; for this it needs the circuit’s netlist.

To allow the test to cover more than just those nets directly connected to JTAG-enabled ICs, the software needs to model the circuit and understand how to control the devices on the board; a BOM helps the test system to achieve this by providing details of the components it will interact with during a test. Other data such as a schematic can be useful because it allows the software to display devices in the context of their circuit instead of just referring to them by their reference designators.

This information is all entered into XJDeveloper using the Boards screen and forms the foundation on which most boundary scan tests rely. The process for entering design data and configuring XJDeveloper to use it is described in detail in this section of the user-guide.

The individual steps of the process are:

• import netlist
• import schematic
• import BOM information
• define rules for identifying unfitted devices

Various file formats are supported for importing this data, and these are explained in the following sections, together with, where appropriate, an explanation of why some formats are to be preferred over others.