Automated experimental design for automatic test equipment software

Achieving an effective stimulation pattern for an electronic circuit card is an elusive and labor intensive task. In contrast to the vectorless testing concept which assumes nothing about the circuit card, our implementation would contain a circuit topology and a designation of devices in the circuit, including standard designation input devices, output devices, voltage and current sources, etc. A library interface is supplied to specify (when required) the safe ranges of stimulation, signal sources and analog waveforms, probe paths and if desired, an operating range and quantization of a device. As opposed to passive testing, this technique allows the tester to jump into the operating range of the device. Stimulation pattern effectiveness is measured in terms of output entropy. While the initial stimulation pattern may be selected at random, directed search techniques allow the optimization of the stimulation by eliminating redundancy, and changing existing patterns toward a stimulation pattern of increased entropy. A digital application of this concept is being developed for the Electronic Work Bench (EWB), a new VXI system using components from Talon. While a fully automatic process is not always practical, this concept should make considerable headway toward reducing to human labor cost while improving the overall process.