Chris Plumlee - President

I have a MSEE in Electrical Engineering specializing in Embedded Design and am always learning new things.  Starting my career as a Boundary Scan (AKA IEEE 1149.1/JTAG) test engineer, I found that most of the problems I addressed on a daily basis were minor variations on a theme. After some background in structural test theory at Nortel, I automated my job by writing middleware to extract the information needed for test development directly from the CAD system. Board designers were soon subscribing to automated testability reports I set up on the CAD server and I was promoted to Global JTAG Tools Prime.

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Since JTAG structural test is mostly limited to digital areas of a product, I had to explore functional test to fully cover some products. I developed Universal Functional Test library covering a company’s entire offering of 30 telecom products running on Tcl/Expect, an integrated pair of device control languages. Again using a generalized approach, when solving this problem I developed a set of libraries to control various kinds of test equipment and execute common test functions. Limiting functional test to areas of the product not already covered by JTAG. I kept costs and times low. When our business minds acquired a broader product line I quickly integrated this into the same test framework for uniformity on and reporting from the production line.  Acquiring the rights to this code, I have built on it for many years in a variety of functional test applications.

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While structural tests such as JTAG, Flying Probe, and ICT provide superior cost, performance, and diagnostic capability in a manufacturing environment, I address the entire product in a test review, and it is common to add functional test for a handful of product features.  For this reason I continue building on the Universal Functional Test library to shorten development cycles and would be happy to put it to work for you.