ATPG Wars - Magma comes back swinging…
One of the announcements from Test Week’s onslaught of test-related press releases from EDA vendors was Magma’s roll-out of Talus ATPG and Talus ATPG-X.  A couple of interesting things about this product:
1) Its tight integration into the Talus toolset means that it is a Magma user’s tool only. So Magma is marketing it to about a third (?) of the total available ATPG market.
2) Its both multi-threaded and distributed - which are probably both necessary given the fact that the tool is tapping into the physical database to target multiple fault models concurrently (this was Siyad’s first comment when we were discussing the announcement).
3) It uses a ’stateless broadcaster’ and compactor for test data compression, for a ~40X compression capability. This is similar to Synopsys’ DFT MAX compression. There are other similarities as pointed out in this post at The Tao of ASICs (amongst them, a prime example of synchronicity related to multiple fault detection using one pattern, including reordering of patterns based on fault type) . The Tao is declaring it a “DFT Arms Race”.
Talus ATPG and ATPG-X are placed right in the sweet spot of current ATPG development - links to the physical database and detection of multiple fault types. We’ll be interested to see how this plays out.
Coming up later this week we’ll discuss more of last week’s announcements.
Stumble It!
You are joking right? I saw the demo for the Magma DFT tool, and to be honest it left me stone cold.
Yes it was integrated into a physical environment so consequently had some nice links to that, but other than that - seen it all before about 7yrs ago.
The “compression” was pathetic - 1:many broadcast with an simple XOR compaction. How they got a 40x compression I have no idea (well apart from the circuit had no X’s and was a model student!)
Simple bridging fault was the only exciting fault model - no n-detect etc. No path-delay, just simple transition.
BORED!
Sorry Andy - Your comment got spammed, and I just now noticed it.
It seems to me I’ve heard similar comments from a couple of other people - nothing special about the compression, but the links to the physical are a good thing.
1:many broadcast? Are there at least muxes to vary the data, or is it quasi-Illinois scan? What exactly is the simple bridging model?
What else was interesting for you at ITC?
[...] here goes: In 2007, Ben Bennetts retires, and Tom Williams receives a lifetime achievement award. Magma DFT is re-animated. Power aware test and small delay-defects go mainstream - Synopsys claims the lead in both. DFT can [...]