A demonstration circuit to support e-learning on IEEE 1149.1/4 infrastructures

Test and debug tasks are part of the life cycle in any electronic circuit. The IEEE1149.1 infrastructure was developed to support structural test operations on electronic digital boards and was rapidly accepted. Later, to extend the same functionalities for analog and mixed-signal boards was developed the IEEE1149.4. Despite being a standard its acceptance has been slower and is relatively unknown when compared with the digital counterpart. Even worse, teaching subjects related with this last infrastructure are a tough task because has been produced only one compliant IC and none commercial demonstration boards are available. This work presents a teaching oriented mixed-signal circuit as part of a remote access platform to demonstrate IEEE1149.1/4 capabilities. The circuit was specially designed to cover several possibilities to perform and compare observation and control operations through the referred infrastructures. An applet allows remotely configuring the test/debug infrastructures according the intended state.