HP Labs Technical Reports

Agatha: An Integrated Expert System to Test and Diagnose Complex PC Boards

Allred, Daryl; Lichtenstein, Yossi; Preist, Chris; Bennett, Mike; Gupta, Ajay

HPL-91-65

Keyword(s):

Abstract: Agatha is an expert system to test and diagnose HP's PA-RISC processor boards, during manufacture. It was a joint development between HP Labs and ICBD. It has been successfully deployed at 3 sites within HP, and is in routine use, giving significant benefits. It has been successfully upgraded to deal with new families of PA-RISC boards. The system is implemented in Prolog and C, and is integrated with the PRISM tester. As different tests performed by the tester need different styles of inference to process them, the system consists of suite of mini expert systems. These cooperate with each other and communicate through the diagnose manager. This paper describes the problem Agatha tackled, and the results that were achieved. It also gives an overview of the Agatha architecture, giving further details about the diagnose manager, the cachebus slice, and the DIP slice.

Back to Index