Design-for-Test Acquisition News
Two items from the news this past week (presumably timed to coincide with Semicon Japan):
First, it was announced Tuesday that Asset Intertech, who provides boundary scan solutions, acquired Intertest Tech (ITT), an Irish supplier of process emulation technology. This seems to be a cementing of the strategic relationship they’ve had for the past three years, which is targeted toward greater functional coverage using JTAG and CPU emulation for both structural and functional testing of PCBs.
Then, just announced today, Verigy (formerly, Agilent, formerly HP), a ‘big iron’ ATE company, has signed a deal to acquire Inovys, who offers ‘DFT Testers’, such as the Ocelot, Ocelot ZFP and Personal Ocelot. This is an interesting turn of events, given that Advantest (another ‘big iron’ ATE company) recently announced their T2000 tester, which claims to cut the cost of test in half.
My first thought is that it seems that in a tight semiconductor market, the test companies are circling the wagons and working together, a la Asset+ITT and Verigy+Inovys.
My second thought, regarding the IC ATE announcements (in conjunction with other articles that have appeared in the recent past), is that perhaps we’ll be seeing more ATE vendors crawling over toward standards-based systems, after years of resistance. At least with the DFT-class testers - most DFT testers are standards-based testers.
Anybody else have a take on this?
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