Open Hardware doesn’t stop at just having a good hardware design. We at CERN believe it is also important to provide a good production test system with the hardware to ease the manufacturing process. For this we have set up a testing environment, called PTS.

The SPEC board also has a range of tests that can run in the PTS environment that has been used to test the cards after production. The company Seven Solutions has just improved the Production Test Suite (PTS) of the SPEC board so that now all memory addresses lines are tested and that boards will not signalled to be defective while they actually are OK. Also the speed of testing has improved. Companies producing the SPEC board should take the latest version out of the PTS repository.

The files that have been modified are:

• test/spec/python/gn4124.py (so that this DMA library automatically configures the Interrupt enable mask register)
• test/spec/python/test07.py (so that all the address lines are checked and the test procedure is accelerated)
• test/spec/firmware/test07.bin (to correct the intermittent-error generation)