DFT Digest

Need to catch up on a few things… with the onset of the DAC season, there are always some interesting things that pop up, even if the conference is light on test. Here is a small list of items that have passed into my weary view, in no particular order:

I know I just said it was DAC season, but before that, in fact, today, Semicon starts.  This is a huge show that addresses the many fascinating  trends and technologies of electronics device manufacturing, including test.  I’d recommend this show to any DFT’er, because it’s always good to familiarize oneself with the main customer (test operations) of one’s work.

Mixed-signal BIST: I’ve blogged a bit on the subject of analog and mixed-signal DFT. It’s one area in test really hurting for automation. Companies offering mixed signal BIST have come and gone – one in particular is still in play, of course, and in the process of being drawn under the umbrella of Mentor (LogicVision). But earlier this week, a guest post on EDA Graffiti by David Hamilton, CEO of a startup called ATEEDA, introduced a set of “Push-Button BIST solutions for analog“, which to me, is somewhat oxymoronic to me, even if it were used to describe a digital tool. Sorry, nothing is “push-button”. However, I’m all for pushing in the direction of more efficient, on-chip, analog test. If you’re at DAC, check them out.

OCI – Open Compression Interface (IEEE 1450.6.1) was ratified by the IEEE! This is good news to me, and I would think anyone else using a proprietary scan compression scheme.  I’ve blogged about this standard before.  This standard paves the way for interoperability between the tools used for generating efficient high fault coverage test patterns (scan compression tools), and tools used for diagnosis and yield analysis. Currently, the customer is constrained to using analysis tools provided by the vendor of the tool that created the patterns. Good for the EDA vendor, bad for the customer, in my opinion.

John Cooley, in his latest “Industry Gadfly” had a list of most read ESNUG posts… and although there was a link to a post full several e-mails from engineers in China, singing praises of Mentor’s TestKompress tool (from last year around ITC week, which I’d previously missed), there was no DFT/test related material in his list of hot topics. Surprised? Me neither.

DAC’09 (or #46DAC, if you’re onto Twitter): Are you going?  11 days to kickoff.  If nothing else, this is the year that social media became a significant tool for promoting the conference. There is a DAC fanclub, for those of you that are particularly fond of the show, Synopsys will be sponsoring “Conversation Central“, explicitly set up to exchanges ideas about social media in EDA.  Tool vendors are twittering, blogging and facebooking like there’s no tomorrow

Speaking of DAC – perhaps the most interesting things there, from a DFT point of view will probably be session 22, chaired by Tom Williams of Synopsys, on speed path identificattion and silicon debug, session 41, on targeted test and diagnosis (these will be particularly interesting if you’re designing the tools), and a talk from Ron Press of Mentor on reduced test routing and pins at the “Design-for-X” exhibitor forum.

Speaking of Synopsys (was I?) a Synopsys webinar is coming up August 5, “Boosting Yield and Increasing Quality with Power-Aware Test and Small Delay Defect Testing”

Speaking of social media – If you follow Twitter, you do pick up on some interesting things that you may have otherwise missed: Warren Savage, CEO of IPextreme, tweeted a link to a new article in EE out about IEEE 1149.7, so-called cJTAG, reduced pin boundary scan, by Stephen Lau of TI, who is responsible for marketing the standard (for several other articles, just google “Stephen Lau 1149.7″).  Oh – I know why Warren Savage is interested in 1149.7…  IPextreme sells IP for it!

That’s it for now… but any of you DFT Digest readers happen to make it o either DAC or Semicon, I’d love to hear your impressions, and pass them along to the community!  Back to work for me…

image credit: Al Souza, Potpourri Redux, 2007