The Silicon Review - Best Business Review Magazine 50 Most Trustworthy Companies 2019 | Page 41

Glenn Woppman | A Formidable Leader
Glenn Woppman serves customers by making sure that
everyone at ASSET continually strives to increase customer
satisfaction. He is in charge of new initiatives and stays
close to the market by spending the majority of his time
with customers, prospects, and the people working closest
with them. Mr Woppman led the ASSET business at Texas
Instruments before spinning ASSET out of TI in 1995. The
original ASSET focus was boundary scan test and he led the
company through its expansion and transition to a leader in
embedded instrumentation.
Mr Woppman holds an MBA from SMU and a BSIE from the
University of South Florida.
Glenn Woppman, President, CEO, & Chairman of the Board
1149.1/JTAG standard established
in 1990. As systems manufacturers
were moving to surface-mount
packaging technologies and more
density of functions on printed
circuit boards, physical access for
board test was becoming more
and more difficult. Thus, the
boundary-scan/JTAG standard
defined an architecture to put IO
cells in silicon at each pin to enable
virtual access. This technology
drove the need and opportunity
for a new way to test using a
software-based test tool running on
a low-cost PC versus the traditional
hardware-based solutions sold
as capital equipment. As part of
the TI semiconductor business,
the ASSET team was able to do
the missionary work to champion
the standards adoption across the
semiconductor industry. But once
adopted, the advantage of being
in TI became limiting since for the
test product line to have a chance
of success it had to work with the
entire semiconductor industry.
Thus, TI agreed to spin off ASSET
into – ASSET: ‘The Boundary-Scan
Company’.
Boundary scan was widely adopted
by the semiconductor industry
in the second half of the 1990s.
The major customers that took
advantage of this new board test
technology and tools were in the
communications, defense/avionics,
and computer systems segments.
ASSET’s ScanWorks became the
leading boundary-scan test and
programming tool on the market
supporting these three segments.
The key test value ScanWorks
delivers is high test coverage and
robust diagnostics to the pin-level
to find the fault. The key value from
a device programming perspective
is the ability to do in-system
programming based on a standard,
versus individual custom solutions.
A standard way to do in-system
programming enables a host of
manufacturing process efficiencies
in terms of re-programmability and
just-in-time manufacturing changes
that off-board or custom solutions
cannot achieve.
The company expanded its
offerings over the years investing
in new technologies built on the
IEEE 1149.1/JTAG foundation.
Examples of those investments
include supporting IEEE
1149.6 to address AC-coupled
differential signal testing; FPGA
Fast Programming IP and tools to
accelerate in-system programming;
and Processor-based Functional
Test and Programming technology
to support at-speed testing to
further expand the fault domain
that can be covered. All these
technologies are integrated into the
ScanWorks test platform for ease-
of-use and deployment.
ASSET’s first acquisition was
a company in Ireland that was
focused on functional test through
an IEEE 1149.1/JTAG-based
debug port, which supported Intel