Today's customers demand a quality product. To improve the quality of the flow of information throughout the product development process, the development environment must also include reliabilty and maintainability data. Reliability shows the ability of a system to execute the required function in a fixed configuration for a certain amount of time. Maintainability measures what is required to maintain the hardware design or recover it to its nominal working condition. Each design function must be able to be evaluated and observed during the testing phase and life cycle of the products.

Currently in ITALTEL, only maintainability data is taken into account for a PCB design; maintainability analysis is performed manually by simulating circuit net failure using a simple "stuck-at" model. The goal is to test whether injected failure is observed by hardware or software evaluation tools. Each failure produces a symptom--a warning signal of the failure. At the end of this work, PCB designers must produce several reports, such as Failure or Summary tables. Producing manual documentation is time-consuming, tedious and error prone. A PCB designer processing about one thousand logical nets spends about two weeks for each board to produce maintainability documentation. Furthermore, schematics are often redrawn, causing duplication of effort and increased cost.

ITALTEL's new system eliminates these non-value-added steps by providing a software environment that helps designers ensure correct, complete and consistent documentation.

The diagnostic process can be divided into three steps. In the first step, an automatic procedure points out the signal set involved in the fault analysis. In the second phase, the designer evaluates the nets, analyzing the schematic database from the Design ViewPoint Editor. An ad hoc viewpoint is used in which Fault, Effect, Cover and so on are primitive properties. Utilities have been introduced in the tool environment to help users in their fault analysis. Automatic report generation is the final step.

Bio:
Elena Marchetti received a Laurea degree in Computer Science in 1986 from University of Pisa, Italy. Since 1987 she has been employed at the ITALTEL Design Automation department in Milano, where she is responsible for the definition of the PCB design environment.