Anyone seen a Hutron DSI 700 in action?

Like the subject says, have any of you seen or use the Hutron DSI 700?

(Hutron makes the "Tracker" which is an in-circuit, power off component
tester. It plots a current vs. voltage curve for a component which can be
used to determine if it's good or not. Someone a while back on RGVAC
posted a "how to make" article for the "guts" of one using a regular
o-scope in XY mode for a display...)

Anyway, the DSI 700 is really neat looking (from the catalog). It's the
same technology (current vs. voltage, in circuit, power off), but
interfaces to a PC. This box in-turn connects to the board you want to
test by some DIP-clips on your target IC's. Now the neat part. It
digitizes the response curves of up to 64 pins at a time and stores the
"signature" on the PC. Cool. So you "scan" a known good Star Wars board
at a few points (CPU's, DACs, RAM, whatever) and hook up a bad one. The
DSI can then simultaneously test a whole bunch of test points and bad
"nets" will show up on a pin-by-pin basis. :-) (So a bad driver in a '244
on the address bus will affect the trace of the probes on the CPU and get
flagged as "bad".) Kinda like a 9010A, but full analog AND digital test
with the power off and/or the device completely dead!

Too bad it's $3000. :-( There's GOT to be something we need it for at
work... ;-)

-Clay

Clayton N. Cowgill Engineering Manager
_______________________________________________________________________
/\ Diamond Multimedia Systems, Inc. clay@supra.com
\/ Communications Division http://www.supra.com/
Received on Tue Jan 13 16:49:20 1998