Incorporating ATML interface standards within an ATE software architecture

This paper examines the automatic test system (ATS) interface standards being developed by the new automatic test markup language (ATML) standards group. The intent of the ATML group is to define standards for ATS interfaces using extensible markup language (XML). The group was formed out of a desire to promote open systems for common ATS software components. A description of the eight proposed interfaces are provided along with suggestions of possible applications for each ATML interface. This paper explores ways to incorporate these standards within the software architecture of automatic test equipment (ATE). This paper also presents one implementation of ATML standards showing the generation of ATML data from an existing test data format. The BAE Systems software tool Recycler™ is shown as a way of generating compliant, ATML formatted data.