The IEEE European Test Symposium (ETS) has been facilitating progress in electronic systems testing since its launch in 1996. On the occasion of its 30th anniversary, this collaborative paper gathers sections by 21 ETS teams to outline their influential ideas and milestones. Each team’s section highlights historical perspective, current research, frameworks and projects as well as forward-looking research agendas in the area of electronic-based circuits and systems testing, reliability, safety, security and validation. This anniversary summary documents how research of various ETS teams, exemplifying the test community, has been evolving and transitioning from concepts to practical standards and Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools and flows. This legacy is a strong base to drive the next generation of advances in electronic systems testing.

AQTR is an international, biennial conference on automation, quality, testing and robotics. It is traditionally held in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, in the heart of Transylvania, since 1981 (formerly called THETA). The high quality of papers, presentations, plenary speeches, networking at the social events, the overwhelming interest in the IoT Student Challenge and the positive feedback from conference attendees bring in more and more participants, European and from abroad, making it a continued success. The 2020 edition of AQTR will be held on May 21-23.

This paper presents an approach for developing an extended prediction self-adaptive controller employing graphical programming of industrial standard devices for controlling fast processes. For comparison purposes, the algorithm has been implemented on three different field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) chips. This paper presents research aspects regarding graphical-programming controller design, showing that a single advanced control application can run on different targets without requiring significant program modifications. Based on the time needed for processing the control signal and on the application, one can efficiently and easily select the most appropriate device. To exemplify the procedure, a conclusive case study is presented.

The implementation of the Extended Prediction Self-Adaptive Controller is presented in this paper. It employs LabVIEWTMgraphical programming of industrial equipment and it is suitable for controlling fast processes. Three different systems are used for implementing the control algorithm. The research regarding the controller design using graphical programming demonstrates that a single advanced control application can run on Windows, real time operating systems and FPGA targets without requiring significant program modifications. The most appropriate device may be selected according to the required processing time of the control signal and of the application. A relevant case study is used to exemplify the procedure.

Memory systems security has increased over the last decade due to the sensitive information which is stored in plain text. Device specific attacks, such as cold-boot and side-channel monitoring have been reported as being successfully in retrieving encryption and private keys from algorithms like AES and RSA. In this paper, we propose a new technique of securing the cache memories by scrambling the stored data that uses interleaved scrambling vectors which reduce the power consumption if compared to the standard scrambling technique. Dissemination rules for the retained data in the cache are employed, in order to make data unusable if retrieved successfully by any type of attack. The proposed technique is analyzed and evaluated from several points of views, including area overhead, power consumption and time performance.

This paper presents a complete solution for temperature and humidity monitoring using low-power wireless devices, called Wi-Sensors. The Wi-Sensors use a RN-131C Wi-Fi chip as the core microcontroller and 4 configurable digital input/output lines to which temperature sensors can be attached. The digital 1-Wire and DHT22 protocols had been implemented in the embedded application running on the device. Therefore, for temperature and humidity measurements, any of the sensors operating with one of these two protocols can be used. The existing Wi-Fi 802.11 infrastructure can be used in order to send measurement data to remote destinations. The proposed solution also incorporates a data viewer and data processing application, which provides functionalities for alarming the users by email or by SMS in case previously configured limits are exceeded.

A novel family of codes for the detection, localization and correction of unidirectional errors for DRAMs in proposed. For DRAM memories, multi-bit soft and hard errors are a growing concern, as the cell sizes continue to decrease with aggressive scaling down. As a result, the classical error detection/correction codes become less efficient to deal with multiple errors in a single word [16]. Berger codes are effective in detecting 100% of the unidirectional errors, but introduce considerable delay and does not provide any error correction feature. In order to decrease the computing time of the code check bits and, at the same time, to provide the possibility to localize the segment(s) where single or multiple errors have occurred, a modification of the Berger code is proposed, called Carry Save K Berger code (CS-K Berger). Basically consists in using Carry Save representations of the partial additions of the word segments. The number of check bits increases as compared with Berger code and consequently the code redundancy overhead increases but the delay in computing the check bits and the corresponding checking is drastically reduced. In addition, some patterns of unidirectional errors become correctable. The proposed CS-K Berger codes for different values of K are analyzed for different word lengths. The hardware required for code generation and verification is discussed as well, as the possibility of using this code for word segment replacement in online applications of DRAMs.

Technology constantly follows the needs of the marketplace. The current trend of producing digitally-aware environments keeps growing, and it is very likely that in the future we will be surrounded by many heterogeneous devices which communicate each other through distributed and wireless interfaces. We will see a new society of digital systems, whose individuals will be ubiquitous and heterogeneous systems interacting together and providing high productivity and great flexibility. Two technologies seem to be emerging to support this new paradigm: mobile data agents to handle the complexity and heterogeneity of networked infrastructures, and real-time reconfigurable systems to implement flexible, adaptable, and high performance individuals. This paper analyzes how the innovative aspects of these new technologies could be exploited to implement innovative and efficient test and repair strategies

We present some ideas and experiments on using microagents for testing and repairing a distributed system, whose elements may or may not have embedded BIST (built in self test) and BISR (built in self repair) facilities. The microagents are software modules that perform monitoring, diagnosis and repair of the faults. They form together a society whose members communicate, set goals and solve tasks. The platforms taken into consideration for mobile tester microagents include Java Micro Edition, BREW, Symbian, PalmOS, as well as more general small scale platforms. Experimental tester agents in Java 2 Micro Edition and PalmOS are also presented, a solution that ensures portability, flexibility, but also a relatively small memory footprint.

This paper presents an attempt of using intelligent agents for testing and repairing a distributed system, whose elements may or may not have embedded BIST (built-in self-test) and BISR (built-in self-repair) facilities. The agents are software modules that perform monitoring, diagnosis and repair of the faults. Together they form a society whose members communicate, set goals and solve tasks. To demonstrate the idea we used the Zeus agent development environment. Two examples of distributed systems are presented in order to illustrate the cooperative model for fault diagnosis and repair.