DFT Digest

Engineering is not cool. Probably hasn’t been for a generation and a half now. I have a solution - we should hire Paris Hilton, Lindsey Lohan and Britney Spears (and of course! We’ll bring in someone like Brad Pitt for the girls) to do engineering PSA’s (”You know what I like between me and my engineer? Nothing…”). Nope - what do we get? Al Yankovich singing “White and Nerdy”. ROTLOL. Well, we bring it on ourselves. Live long and prosper.

All kidding aside, engineering education, and attracting local talent is on a lot of people’s minds these days. During the keynote at last week’s DesignCon in Santa Clara, Dr. Leah Jamieson outlined some of the efforts going on to make better engineers out of engineering students.

But what about getting kids into engineering school in the first place? Math and science classes at the k-12 level don’t seem to be holding the kid’s interest. I mean, I’ve helped my daughter with her science homework, and I’m bored.

In an article from the EDN website, TI CEO Rich Templeton remarked, “We all need to give back by [...] encouraging k-12 kids to take an interest in math and science. We have to help attract talented people to engineering and make ours a stronger profession”. But really, as all you inguneers out there know, engineering!=math+science anyway It’s a creative experience. And that’s what we should stress from the start.

Some suggest not bothering. In fact I blogged about it soon after I started this blog, way back in March 2006 - at the time there was a reader’s opinion thread running through EE Times about whether you as an engineer would encourage your child to do the same.

Then recently, I saw an article by Howard Johnson, PhD. over at EDN, in which he talked about a letter he received from a high school student asking questions about how he became interested in his profession, what goals students should have with respect to their education, and how science education helps him in his everyday life. Johnson offered some excellent answers to the questions.

His main advice? Get a good hobby. Seriously - it doesn’t matter what the hobby is, but if it engages you, it will drive you to learn and be good at something, which, for lack of a better way of saying it - can create demand for you. He very succinctly points out that “People lacking useful skills or knowledge are forced to trade their time for money. Time is all they have to offer.”

Good advice, no matter the profession…

The Cell Broadband Engine, that is.  Neat article over at Evaluation Engineering.  Written bt DFT engineers from IBM and Brion Keller from Cadence, the article details the overall test approach for this multicore SoC.   I don’t know how new the article is, since Cadence released this PR in April of last year.  But it was still an interesting read.

With low pin count (128 pins were used for test) as a key goal, they took advantage of the modularity  by broadcasting scan to all the Synergistic Processor Elements (SPE) cores at once.  In BIST mode they can be tested together or independently.

One of the more interesting bits, I thought, was that for performance and power consumption, much of the data path part of the design was left non-scan.  About 40% of the total design turned out to be non-scan, if I read it right.  I would classify that as ‘partial-scan’.  Anyway, despite the data path being mostly non-scan, they did limit the number of consecutive non-scan stages, enabling them to use ATPG to test it anyway, in sequential mode.

All in all they threw the DFT book at this device, including scan, memory BIST, logic BIST, JTAG and test compression, using Cadence’s OPMISR+ (which should come as no surprise, since that technology was developed at IBM before Cadence bought it).

Impressive job!