Comments on: Mentor puts its money where its DFT mouth is

By: OK - you gotta think a little harder than that…

OK - you gotta think a little harder than that… — Fri, 22 May 2009 22:57:26 +0000

[...] blogged the announcement when it happened a couple weeks ago, and received 2 comments wondering why [...]

By: The Other Test Guy

The Other Test Guy — Wed, 13 May 2009 22:12:59 +0000

Would be interesting to get a comment from Synopsys. Were they outbid by Mentor, or did the fact that LogicVision never had a profitable year turn them off to the BIST market. Maybe they wanted to maintain profitability at the risk of finally losing the dominant test market share position

Not sure what Steve means by product being “complimentary”. Most of the key products do overlap. Wonder if MENT will merge or kill off some Logicvision products.

By: Jeff

Jeff — Wed, 13 May 2009 16:57:53 +0000

I wonder if Synopsys was ever a factor, there would have been even less overlap. So will MBISTA be slowly phased out? I still do see it around a fair bit, and for many designs, it’s perfectly fine.

By: John

John — Mon, 11 May 2009 21:32:15 +0000

Lou:

Thanks for reading and commenting! I will be interesting to see what form this all takes, since Mentor and LogicVision alike are mum on details. Stay tuned!

David:

That’s a good point – although I’d like to see the SerDes BIST on more than ARM SerDes – it’s more accurate than most of the BIST implementations that the IP vendors normally use. Also, from what I gather, LV’s SerDes BIST is more usually sold to the users, not the IP vendors, since most of the test IP resides outside critical custom circuitry (i.e. in the placed and routed user logic). Actually, we discussed this somewhat in a recent post: http://www.dftdigest.com/blog-posts/testability-of-high-speed-serdes/

Thanks for reading and commenting!

By: David

David — Mon, 11 May 2009 19:24:56 +0000

Sounds like a good union of two good EDA vendors.
Although, maybe ARM would have been a better fit
since they provide serdes PHY IP and excellent characterization
of high-speed serdes would have been more important
to their customers than to users of EDA tools.

By: Lou Covey

Lou Covey — Fri, 08 May 2009 19:07:40 +0000

Gotta say this one took me by surprise. Not that it doesn’t make sense, it’s just that I had totally written off LV as a lost cause and just wasn’t paying attention. It makes more sense than Cadence/Magma considering how small and lethargic the test market has become. Not sure it can support more than one real BIST player.