Test and Measurement: Know It All

Chapter 19. Boundary Scan Techniques

Perhaps the most significant impediment to building a successful board-test strategy is the need for efficient, effective, and timely test programs. Unfortunately, constant increases in board complexity run at cross-purposes to meeting that need. Bed-of-nails techniques can alleviate some of the pain by reducing the logic depth that a particular test element must exercise to confirm a correct response to a particular input pattern, but today's boards often lack the necessary node access.

In addition, many boards serving military and other high-reliability applications require conformal coatings to prevent contamination during normal service. In those cases, beds-of-nails and guided-fault-isolation probes ...