Patent ID: 7505862

Claim:
A method for testing behavior of an electronic system having a system processor mounted on a system board and a system bus comprising: providing a test chip that is mounted on the system board; executing system cycles in accordance with a test program running on the system processor to provide system signals on the system bus; sampling multiple bits of the system bus directly and in parallel to obtain sampled system signals during at least one of the system cycles, the act of sampling multiple bits of the system bus including generating a test vector having a number of bits equal to the number of multiple bits sampled; comparing in the test chip the sampled system signals with signals representing known good behavior, the act of comparing the sampled signals including receiving a proven test vector representing the known good behavior and having the number of bits and conducting a parallel comparison of the multiple bits of the test vector and the multiple bits of the proven test vector; sending results of the comparisons to a test support computer; and acting on at least one result in accordance with whether the comparison indicates good or bad system behavior.