With more demanding requirements on test program development projects, for example, the competitive Cost of Time (COT) target which can potentially break into new markets, Test Time Reduction (TTR) plays an important role in this step.

In order to take advantage of Adaptive Pin Expansion Architecture (APEx) and floating architecture of ETS-800 tester, Showtool comes as handy tool to test program developers on ETS-800 system.

Showtool is a graphical tool that shows the status of all the instruments connections in ETS-800 system and how each connection path has changed at different sections of test code. Considering that ETS-800 tester is designed to allow flexibility in terms of instruments connectivity, users can use Showtool to understand what options they have to optimize connections and instrument setups, which often helps to reduce test time significantly.

This paper will go through how to incorporate Showtool into MST for debugging and the tips to use it for TTR with real case study in detail.