| 摘要 |
PURPOSE: A test system is provided, which not only tests the various components of a circuit pack, but also keeps a record of the current test results and failures that provides information about the location of a defect even when a test program cannot run to completion, and that the test system keep a historical record of the test program results immediately pointing to the intermittently failing or failed components and the failed step of the test program. CONSTITUTION: A self-testing system executes various test programs in a test suite, and keeps a historical record of test results from previous test suites in non-volatile memory. The historical record is updated only when the most recent results are different than the last-recorded results, and are easily accessible for circuit pack failure analysis and repair. At the beginning of each test suite, a temporary record for containing test results is initialized. As the system progresses through the various test programs, the test programs update the temporary record with test results. In preferred embodiment, this temporary record is created by utilizing two registers, a start register and an end register. The start register stores the beginning of each test program (test portion) in a test suite and the end register stores the ending of each test program. If a test suite runs to completion the start and end registers will contain the same value. However, if a test program in a test suite cannot run to completion, the value stored in the start register will be one greater than the value stored in the end register. Should a fault, possibly intermittent, on the circuit pack under test cause a test program to halt or hang, a sanity-recovery mechanism causes the self-testing system to be restarted. Prior to initializing the temporary record at the beginning of the next test suite, the temporary record is examined to determine whether a previously executed test suite failed to run to completion. If the examination shows that it failed to run to completion, and the failure information is different than the last-recorded results in the historical record, then information from the temporary record indicating this failure is stored in the historical record.
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