Effective testability design for the product life-cycle

Product life-cycle costs outweigh by a significant margin those of product design, manufacture, and purchase. Often, this factor is not taken into account at design time, other than from experience gained on previous programs, at least not in any detail and certainly not by the individual designers. The reasons for this are typically due to the overall "titanic" complexities of this issue. Testability design, is of importance at all levels of the product design, i.e. chip, board, system, and the manufacture, installation and field service. Unfortunately, testability design is not taught to any detail in the educational establishments, and the need for "suitable" levels of testability is not often appreciated There are still many misunderstandings as to the capabilities of the various test methods and their likely impact upon the overall economics of product manufacture and maintenance previous work has demonstrated that the effective selection of testability methods can seriously reduce the cost of manufacturing test for chips, boards and systems. Some work has also been done to analyze aspects of field service of a particular type of consumer product. In this paper we present a new approach for determining the optimum testability for systems with a long lifetime, opening a path towards effective cost savings for tailor-made systems.