Boundary-Scan formally known as IEEE ANSI Standard 1149.1-1990 is a collection of design
rules applied principally at the Integrated Circuit (IC) level that allow software to alleviate
the growing cost of designing producing and testing digital systems. A fundamental benefit of
the standard is its ability to transform extremely difficult printed circuit board testing
problems that could only be attacked with ad-hoc testing methods into well-structured problems
that software can easily deal with. IEEE standards when embraced by practicing engineers are
living entities that grow and change quickly. The Boundary-Scan Handbook Second Edition:
Analog and Digital is intended to describe these standards in simple English rather than the
strict and pedantic legalese encountered in the standards. The 1149.1 standard is now over
eight years old and has a large infrastructure of support in the electronics industry. Today
the majority of custom ICs and programmable devices contain 1149.1. New applications for the
1149.1 protocol have been introduced most notably the `In-System Configuration' (ISC)
capability for Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). The Boundary-Scan Handbook Second
Edition: Analog and Digital updates the information about IEEE Std. 1149.1 including the 1993
supplement that added new silicon functionality and the 1994 supplement that formalized the
BSDL language definition. In addition the new second edition presents completely new
information about the newly approved 1149.4 standard often termed `Analog Boundary-Scan'. Along
with this is a discussion of Analog Metrology needed to make use of 1149.1. This forms a
toolset essential for testing boards and systems of the future.
