XJTAG Offers Contract Manufacturers a Free XJRunner.

CAMBRIDGE, England -- XJTAG, a leading supplier of boundary scan development tools, is offering UK-based contract electronic manufacturers (CEMs) a free XJRunner, the production-optimised version of its XJTAG boundary scan development system.

"We want to remove the barrier to boundary scan adoption in the UK by ensuring that every CEM has XJTAG in its test portfolio," says Simon Payne, CEO of XJTAG. "With more and more design engineers using XJTAG during the development phase to debug and test their early prototypes and then outsourcing their circuit production, we want to provide all CEMs with the capability to re-use these tests through into production and beyond."

XJRunner is designed to speed up the testing of densely-populated printed circuit boards - particularly those with JTAG devices such as ball grid array (BGA), chip scale devices, and other high-density packages, which cannot be tested by traditional methods.

XJRunner is a run-only version of the XJTAG development system. It is designed for use in the production environment for executing complex board tests written using XJTAG's high-level, C-like test description language for creating complex and re-usable tests for printed circuits.

"XJRunner offers CEMs a multitude of significant and quantifiable benefits," added Simon Payne. "It improves the speed and accuracy of fault diagnosis, achieves high test coverage, boosts production yields and reduces lifecycle costs. In addition, as product development cycles shorten and board re-spins become more frequent, it can also replace costly in-circuit test fixtures."

XJRunner is packed with features to simplify production line testing with its friendly graphical user interface and simple pass/fail test results. XJRunner can be used for JTAG and cluster testing of numerous devices including BGAs, SDRAMs, Ethernet controllers, video interfaces, flash memories, FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) and microprocessors.

"Forward-thinking CEMs, or electronic manufacturing services (EMS) providers, are becoming strategic outsourcing partners to their OEM (original equipment manufacturer) clients and are getting involved very early in the design cycle," added Simon Payne. "Consequently, many of our EMS clients now have a full XJTAG development system as they want to go beyond the run-time capability of XJRunner and create their own reusable test scripts, program system devices and gain access to the JTAG chain circuit visualisation feature."

The XJTAG development system is an 'out-of-the-box' solution for debugging and testing complex printed circuit boards populated with JTAG and non-JTAG (cluster) devices. It can migrate seamlessly through the product life cycle from early design and prototyping through to production, field support and repair. XJTAG enables circuit designers to cut the cost and shorten the development cycle by facilitating early test development, early design validation of CAD netlists, fast generation of highly functional tests and test re-use across circuits that utilise the same devices.

To apply for a free XJRunner, please visit XJTAG's web site at www.xjtag.com.

For more information about the XJTAG Development System, please contact XJTAG, The Irwin Centre, Scotland Road, Dry Drayton, Cambridge CB3 8AR, England. Telephone [phone], facsimile [phone] or email [e-mail]. Alternatively, visit XJTAG at the Embedded Systems Show (October 11-12, NEC, Birmingham, UK) or at Electronica (November 14-17, New Munich Trade Fair, Germany).

Photography to accompany this news release is available at:

http://www.xjtag.com/press-releases.php