The importance of testing complex electronics
The increasing functionality of modern electronics systems is being achieved through more complex integrated circuits, dense surface mount assemblies and increasingly through the use of multiple complex ICs interconnected to form multi-chip modules, all of which have progressively increased the cost of testing and its share of production cost, so that test costs are dominant today. Initiatives taken in Europe by leading corporations and recently adopted as IEEE standards for logic circuit testability, are now enabling electronic access for in-circuit testing and diagnostics at IC and board and MCM level, thereby improving quality and throughput in the manufacture of electronics. various proprietary solutions are also being introduced very effectively for analogue circuits, and for specialised computing and telecommunications systems, some using expert systems to aid diagnostics and improving the quality and throughput of testing. The solutions are most cost-effectively introduced at the design stage when maximum impact can be achieved on subsequent life-cycle costs.
Cutting the high cost of testing
A modeling approach to the overly long testing of analog and mixed-signal devices that saves substantially on time and cost is described. The discussion focuses on the particular case of a 13 bit analog-to-digital converter (ADC). The problems that arise in testing ADCs are identified, showing that the success of the test method depends critically on the quality of the model. Two types of models are examined, physical-sensitivity-based models and empirical-learning-based models, and it is noted that the latter are especially attractive for performance-testing applications like the ADC example. An 18-parameter model of the 13 bit ADC was developed using a combination of physical and empirical modeling techniques and was highly successful. With an array process to speed up the computations, the computational overhead can be kept below 1 s per device, so the test time, which is reduced by a factor of 128, becomes negligible.<<ETX>>
Conception of a Language Learning Environment Based on the Communicative and Actional Approaches
This paper's aim is to give a conceptual framework about the conception of a Computer Assisted Language Learning environment based on the communicative and actional approaches. In this environment, the learner is implicated in a task that he/she has to complete by interacting with a partner using his/her language competencies. Given a task, different ways exist to accomplish it and the different competencies of the learner can then be solicited with different types of interaction. Works accomplished in human computer dialogue give models to manage this interaction.