UM-B-041
SmartBond Production Line Tool
User Manual
Revision 4.8
02-Nov-2022
CFR0012
30 of 170
© 2022 Renesas Electronics
6.4
System Requirements
contains the minimum system requirements for the PLT to operate.
Table 8: Minimum System Requirements
Item
Minimum Requirements
Operating system
Windows 10
CPU
Quad Core CPU
Memory
4 GB RAM or larger. Each device log can reach up to 40 kB.
Hard drive
For 100000 devices, at least
4 GB
of available hard disk is required.
Monitor resolution
1280 x 768 or higher
Monitor DPI
Smaller
– 100 % = 96 DPI
Supported
Medium
– 125 % = 120 DPI
Supported
Larger
– 150 % = 144 DPI
Not supported
6.5
Limitations
Parallel control
of multiple PLT hardware boards on the same PC is
not supported
.
However, by correctly setting up the system, two or more PLT hardware boards could be connected
and controlled by multiple GUI PLT application instances on the same PC, but the tests should only
be executed
sequentially
. The main reasons for this limitation are indicated below:
●
The GU FT232 FTDI IC is programmed with a special serial string, "
DialogSemi
" (see
).
This is used in the '
GU COM port find
' PLT operation. This operation searches all PC connected
FTDIs to find the serial string "
DialogSemi
". When found, it saves it as the GU COM port number
to be used by the PLT. The '
GU COM port find
' operation will open and lock, for a short period of
time, all Windows COM ports, one by one, even the ones used by the other PLT hardware. If the
second GUI PLT application instance is performing test operations at the same time and wants to
open its DUT COM ports, the operation may fail.
●
When the GUI PLT application starts the test operations, it performs a DUT COM port
enumeration. During this process, the GU sets the CPLD in UART loopback mode. It opens all
PC COM ports one by one and sends a specific word, while trying to see if it receives it back.
During t
his process, other PLTs may need to work with ‘their’ DUT COM ports, which may
happen to be currently used by the ‘DUT COM port enumeration’ process of the first PLT.
●
GU hardware reset. In every PLT test run a GU HW reset is issued from the PLT software using
a specific GU FTDI GPIO pin. To access the GU FTDI, the FTDI API is used from
ftd2xx.dll
.
To access the FTDI hardware and read the serial number through the FTDI
ftd2xx.dll
the
FT_Open
API is used on all PC COM ports, one by one. Since
FT_Open
is used in all PC COM
ports, conflicts could arise if other PLTs would also like to use these COM ports.
●
BD addresses handling. Usually, the PLT automatically sets the DUT BD addresses by
increasing them one by one. Special care should be taken to work with multiple PLT hardware
and software. Most probably, two different BD address files should be used for each PLT
hardware.
