Asset InterTech gains CPU access with ITT acquisition
Rick Nelson, Chief Editor -- Test & Measurement World, 1/29/2008 10:58:00 AM
Asset InterTech in December acquired International Test Technologies (ITT). Glenn Woppman, president and CEO of Asset InterTech, and Billy Fenton, Asset’s chief technologist for CPU emulation and former ITT CEO, discuss how the acquisition helps break down the barriers between structural and functional test in a recent phone interview.
Woppman began by commenting that boundary scan, whether from Asset InterTech or other vendors, has been widely adopted in the communications, networking, and telecom space and in the defense and avionics space. Specific Asset customers in these areas, he said, include ITT, General Dynamics, GE Fanuc, Northrop Grumman, Cisco Systems, EMC2, Alcatel-Lucent, Raytheon, and Nortel.
He said Asset originally pursued a partnership with ITT to take advantage of ITT’s strength in the computer segment. “When we got our partnership together in a few years back, we saw that Billy and ITT were real strong on the Intel architectures, and his tools had and still do have automated test program generation,” a capability that stemmed from the standardized nature of Intel’s North Bridge and South Bridge chipset technology. ITT was strong in the computer segment, Woppman continued, noting that Asset wasn’t, because North Bridge and South Bridge don’t support boundary scan. He said he saw that ITT’s CPU emulation technology could operate in synergy with Asset’s boundary scan while helping Asset move more into the computer segment to complement its communications, avionics, and defense business.
Fenton concurred that 15-year-old ITT has had its main emphasis over the last decade on Intel x86 architectures. “In the earlier years we were very much focused on the standard PC-type space. But in the last number of years we’ve been involved, although still with the Intel x86 architecture, more in the embedded space,” serving companies like EMC2. “We also did support other processor types,” he added, “which would be more prevalent in the mil-aero-telecoms type space, and we had some success in those spaces, but certainly the computation space was where we were most successful.” High-profile ITT customers, he said, have included Honeywell, Fujitsu-Siemens, GE Fanuc, NCR, Dell, Solectron, SCI/SanMina, Jabil, Cisco Systems, and Motorola in addition to EMC2.
Woppman noted that Asset and ITT share a common background in taking a nonintrusive view of test in which test takes place through a JTAG port. The difference, he said, is that while Asset has taken a more structural approach to test, ITT comes at it from more of a board functional level. Woppman cited the proverbial wall between design and test, and then commented that in working with ITT and customers he has identified yet one more barrier: “On thing we’ve found is another wall—hopefully not as high a wall—between structural test and functional test.”
Fortunately, the wall turned out not to be very high for high-mix, low-volume manufacturers. When the Asset-ITT partnership proposed to engineers at these companies a combination of boundary-scan structural test and emulation functional test, Woppman said, “They tended to get it.”
The wall proved to be much higher for high-volume manufacturing, however. Woppman said that high-volume manufacturers tend to have teams dedicated to structural test only or functional test only, and, he said, if you try to introduce one test discipline to practitioners of the other, “They don’t tend to get it.”
He said that he expects, however, that the groups will learn to cooperate, and that ultimately, Asset, ITT, their customers, and other test vendors can cooperate to develop single test stations, perhaps operating under a Test Stand or LabView environment, that can provide emulation and boundary scan to do a lot structural test and board functional test, while in addition being able to call on other instruments to do, perhaps, some RF test. “The two groups who say ‘I only do structural’ and ‘I only do functional’ are beginning to talk and communicate,” Woppman said.
Woppman noted that Asset will be maintaining almost all of the ITT team in County Donegal, Ireland. “This is not the merger of two huge companies, where you’ve got a lot of redundancies. Pretty much everybody from ITT is on board with us, although maybe a few jobs are changing.”
Fenton concluded that “from ITT’s perspective, the joining together with Asset is a very good thing. ITT was pretty small and didn’t really have the sales and support network to push our products properly worldwide. So I think everybody here is pretty excited now joining with Asset, where we can really get CPU emulation on the map.
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