SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory selects Corelis
04 February 2010
Corelis ScanExpress boundary-scan toolset has been installed at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory for use in the Reconfigurable Cluster Element (RCE) initiative, led by Mike Huffer and supported by Information Systems Specialist, Chris O’Grady.
The detectors that the RCE reads out are so fast they can transmit snapshots at roughly 100 femtoseconds (a femtosecond is one quadrillionth of a second). The RCE circuit board modules are currently used to store detector data collected during proton collisions travelling near the speed of light in the two-mile linear accelerator at the University of Stanford. The technology is also being considered for the Very Large Telescope (VLT) Array in Chilé, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN research centre of the Swiss/French border, and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) in Chilé which will study Dark Matter and Dark Energy.
Prior to boundary-scan testing, O’Grady was limited to probing circuit board test points with an oscilloscope resulting in an average debug time of two days for each problematic board. Now with boundary-scan testing, the debug time has been reduced to about one minute, or roughly the time it takes to set-up a board and run the boundary-scan test.
O’Grady explained, “Two days of troubleshooting per board is excessive, especially when highly skilled personnel need to be involved. When five boards are bad, two weeks of my time is tied up causing major delays on other projects. It simply got to a point where we needed to either reduce the debug time or assign the task to someone else. The Corelis tools have allowed me to recover lost time. When five boards have problems, not only do Corelis tools save me two weeks’ worth of work, but I can deliver five boards that much faster. The hardware controller on the low-cost tool was a major weakness. Being aware of the issues, the first criteria we evaluated with Corelis was whether their hardware could meet our requirements. The Corelis hardware was surprisingly powerful. They were able to support multiple TAPs with a single piece of hardware and we were able to customise the interface voltage for each connector.”
With money already spent on boundary-scan tools, O’Grady wanted to see results before spending more money, so Corelis confidently invited him to bring his test bench and boards to develop the boundary-scan test procedure. Corelis even assigned a dedicated application engineer to O’Grady during his visit, but he insisted on taking the driving seat during test procedure development even though he had no previous experience of using the Corelis tools. In a couple of hours, he had his test bench set-up in the lab, wrote the complete test procedure, and successfully executed the test procedure on the RCE board.
“The initial experience with our first JTAG tool made me sceptical that Corelis could deliver better results,” said O’Grady. “It turned out that the Corelis software was extremely user friendly and much more robust. Everything was very intuitive in how it worked. The program literally guided me from point A to point B. I was able to accomplish everything I planned on doing at Corelis in under four hours.”
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory is a multi-programme laboratory exploring frontier questions in photon science, astrophysics, particle physics, and accelerator research.
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