Teaching advanced test issues in digital electronics

An environment targeted to e-learning is presented for teaching advanced test issues in digital electronics. Digital circuits and systems are getting more and more complex, and in the same time the requirements for the quality of systems are getting higher and higher. This is the reason why the importance of testing as an engineering task has started to grow extremely fast. An environment which consists of a set of Java applets has been created to help the students to improve their understanding of test. The tools support university courses on digital electronics, computer hardware, testing and design for testability to learn by hands-on exercises how to generate test patterns, and how to analyze their quality. The tasks chosen for hands-on training represent simultaneously real research problems, which allow to foster in students critical thinking, problem solving skills and creativity.