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I have to choose a tool for production testing of fairly dense PCB's with 4+ FPGAs 10+ DSPs, ethernet controllers and PCI controllers.. Does anyone have any experience with any of the tools available from GOEPEL, XJTAG, Jtag-technologies or if anyone know of any good open source alternatives? That is both the BS hardware controller and/or software..

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3 Answers

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OpenOCD is an open source JTAG debugger, it supports a good range of adapters both open source and proprietary.

It's worth looking into. But, I have only used it for simple boards with single microcontrollers.

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Thanks, I will try that. Looks like the "boundary scan" feature is a fairly new feature in OpenOCD, but worth looking into. Says that it will work with the USB-Blaster as well.. thanks! btw, I signed up for XJTAGS 30 day evaluation (with a controller and everything), the package is on its way now.. – Keh0082 Jun 22 '10 at 8:11
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I work for GOEPEL in the UK, we offer a free trial as well. We normally accompany this with a board setup, so you can get a better feel for what the tools can do. Whereabouts are you based, I can get our local office to get in touch or just register on our website. No real open source alternatives, what you are paying for is automated test generation. The low cost end of the market can normally get you in toggling pins, programming files etc, but if you are looking at production test you need safe quality tests that are going to find your build defects. Depending on your test coverage, you need to consider if Boundary scan alone will cover this or does it need other test strategies or functional test. Be careful on how test coverage is reported, if you start hearing 90-100% quoted then dig deeper into the figures. If it is not too late, check out our design guidelines.

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I can recommend the GOEPEL tools for their extensive set of features and capabilities. Test development is highly automated yet allows me to set constraints easily. The software also comes with great JTAG debug tools. Once you know what you want to do with the tools they can configure a software and hardware configuration that is very price competitive and provides an upgrade path that allows you to add capabilities in the future, if you need to.

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Is it possible to evaluate the tools in any way without buying it? – Keh0082 Jun 22 '10 at 8:12

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