An automatic design technique for hardware system of ATS

The hardware development of Automatic Test System (ATS) is the design foundation of system. Traditionally, hardware design is a manual effort, and then based on it, the ATS software is developed. The disadvantages of manual design are obvious: heavy workload, depending on the experience of developers, limiting the quality, efficiency and standardization of hardware design, and being difficult in design data updating. As a result, the performance of the whole test system is affected. Focusing research on ATS design flows, this paper presents an automatic design technique for hardware system of ATS. During the design process, the only need is to input test points information of Unit Under Test (UUT) and test requirements based on UUT model, and then the development platform will use several new design techniques such as automatic matching between instrument ports and UUT test points, general purpose ports design, automatic switch network generation, ITA auto-routing, and ATS self-test adapter design and so on to finish automatically a series of ATS hardware design works, which are hardware configuration, ITA design, system self-test adapter design, and fabrication drawing generation of ITA, self-test adapter and cables, etc. Developer can also choose the design solution that best fits the need from alternatives provided by development platform. This technique can significantly decrease design to factory implementation time and cost, and increase the degree of standardization and generalization of ATS.