Digital testing under the IEEE-716 C/ATLAS environment: the dark side of the moon?

This paper will shed some light on the capabilities of digital testing under the lEEE defined C/ATLAS automatic testing environment. It addresses the issues of IEEE-716 C/ATLAS adequacy to perform digital testing at various levels of assembly, with particular emphasis on the LRU/WRA level. The authors addressed these issues when involved in projects to post-process LASAR data into a modern C/ATLAS environment. This paper illustrates to the automatic testing community that it is possible to perform digital testing using C/ATLAS and that the IEEE's standard solution performs well when compared with custom digital test environments. Both strengths (like portability and re-hostability) and weaknesses (like performance) are addressed in order to enable the end user to make a more informed decision about the IEEE's standard. The work presented here is based on real-world experience, current trends in the ATE community and frequently asked questions addressed in this field.