Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1514189
30 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I JANUARY 2024 Feature Interview by Barry Matties I-CONNECT007 Digital twin is a buzzword, but it's really just a way to define what everyone has already been aiming for, says Dean Poplett, technical direc- tor at Aster Technologies. But how much does a test company need to put into digital twin? Is it all the equipment or just what needs to be tested? Dean lays out the scenarios Aster man- ages and how they work with companies to help them achieve their goals. Barry Matties: What is today's greatest challenge in testing? Dean Poplett: It's trying to find a new test strat- egy that helps with the board complexity and the size of the board. For example, you have Talking Digital Twin and DFT With Aster boundary scan, which is limited by the compo- nents that are boundary scannable and limited by the design; ICT, where most of the boards are very limited in size, and we don't have room for test points; and AOI, which is diffi- cult because it's an optical system and tests can be quite subjective. You need to be an expert to understand whether it's doing a good test on that component. It's not definitive. With our TestWay soware, we amalgamate the coverage from each machine and test strat- egy into an overall coverage. But the limitation is that there are some components we can't test. It would be nice to find the next strategy that takes us further.