SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS -- August 30, 1999 -- Teradyne, Inc. (NYSE:TER) announced at AUTOTESTCON '99 that its functional board test products fully support the recently approved IEEE digital functional test data standard: Digital Test Interchange Format (DTIF), IEEE standard (Std) 1445.

The approval of DTIF as a full IEEE standard culminates a four-year effort that involved dozens of companies representing digital test equipment suppliers, test program set (TPS) developers, and TPS users. The team worked to develop a data-exchange format that would address the problems of test program data content and format inconsistencies that have made data postprocessing difficult and test data reuse nearly impossible.

"This retargeting of data virtually eliminates the time-consuming task of developing specific test databases for specific ATE systems. Furthermore, the existence of a digital test interchange data standard means that DTIF readers and writers can be developed to move test data between TPS execution environments. A practical example of this is TPS rehosting. Standards like this one position TPSs for reusability in the future as ATE platforms are replaced or upgraded," says Dave Rolince, Teradyne's representative on the IEEE DTIF standard committee.

The Standard Advantage

The DTIF standard establishes a universal data format for digital Go/NoGo and diagnostic test data. Postprocessors can now be easily written to translate test data from any digital test program generation (DTPG) tool into DTIF, as well as from DTIF to any ATE-specific test program format. From a single standard database of simulation data, test programs can be generated for a variety of functional test platforms. By creating translators that use the DTIF standard, legacy test programs can be rehosted to modern ATE platforms.

Teradyne's LASAR, VICTORY,™ M9-Series, and Spectrum™ functional test products fully support the DTIF standard. LASAR test generation software writes DTIF files through its LSRTAP postprocessor. In the VICTORY family of boundary-scan test generation and diagnostic software, the Boundary-Scan Intelligent Diagnostics (BSID) product uses DTIF fault dictionary files for diagnosing Virtual Component and Cluster Test (VCCT) faults in non-scan clusters. The Spectrum family of functional testers with M9-Series digital test instruments import DTIF files directly for use in Go/NoGo and diagnostic test programs, eliminating the need for additional data translation.

About Teradyne

Teradyne is the world's largest manufacturer of automatic test equipment (ATE) for the electronics industry. Products include systems to test semiconductor devices, printed circuit assemblies, telephone lines, computerized telephone systems, internet and intranet networks, and software. The company is also a leading supplier of high-performance connection systems used in the manufacture of electronics. Teradyne's extensive service network supports customers through a worldwide service and application engineering network, with technical centers located throughout Asia, Europe and North America.

The Assembly Test Division, located in Boston and Walnut Creek, California, serves circuit-board test customers with comprehensive capabilities in test and inspection. These test instruments and systems are used in commercial environments and in military/aerospace applications where reliability, time-to-market, and in-line process test are key to success. Headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, Teradyne reported sales of approximately $1.5 billion in 1998 and had 6,100 employees worldwide. The company's Web address is www.teradyne.com.