COMPANY: Motorola

Motorola has hundreds, or likely thousands, of Tcl coders.

But, unlike Java, Tcl has never been used or officially supported in any cell phone.

All (?!) Motorola semiconductor fabrication facilities are ... individual workstations ... GEM ... recipes coded in Tcl.


I work in the Secure Design Center (part of CGISS [L1 ]) doing embedded development, and I also maintain an automated test platform based on Tcl.

The test platform allows for test automation and data collection of test results. It is organized into three tiers: client, interpreter, and server. All of its functionality is implemented in Tcl/Tk and C extensions.

The client GUI allows the user to interact with the application logic in the interpreter to talk to any of the devices that we can connect to. The server handles communication between all of the components. The interpreter handles all of the logic for driving devices being tested, building, parsing, and validation, running tests, and analyzing test results. Our test tool incorporates extensions for various algorithms as well as extension for accessing SCSI and cPCI buses. This test platform also forms the basis for various tools used in the factory.

We also use a modified version of this test platform as a known answer server. People in our lab and around the country connect to it so that we can share the limited hardware resources on that computer for testing.

         +-----------+                     +---------+
         |  Tcl Test |     physical layer  |device   |
         |            ====data, commands=== under    |
         | Platform  | sent via rs232, NIC,|test     |
         +-----------+ SCSI, cPCI          +---------+

sheila (last updated: 2004/02/11)