DFT Digest

It’s that time of year again: goodbye 2008, hello 2009. How fun for me, the presumptive lonely voice in this quiet little corner of the EDA wilderness, design-for-test, right? BTW, today marks 3 years of DFT Digest -readership grew 50-100% this year, depending upon which numbers you’re looking at. Not bad - hopefully you’ll continue to read, and I’ll continue to compel you.

The rest of the industry talks about ESL, dead DFM companies, the next killer engineering app (energy), white-spaces, and the battle of the PU’s (CPU vs GPU); what’s happening in DFT?

Every once in awhile, I’ll trip on a new design-for-test website or blog that seems interesting or useful, seemingly just for the sake of being useful. Granted, sometimes these sites are just communication channels for a particular EDA vendor, but sometimes that doesn’t matter. Sometimes it’s just something that an ‘enthusiast’ starts up.

I’m not sure which is the case of a blog I found a few weeks back, simply called JTAG JTAG blog provides you with a informational resource on JTAG products, boundary scan testing, and the latest news on JTAG.“, says the tagline.

…let there be no doubt.

As a west coast USA native, like many Americans, I’m a little myopic - I admit it. But it’s never too late to change, right? Well, today, I confess to you all that I missed blogging about what appears to be a very interesting DFT/Test-related event that has just concluded: the seventeenth Asian Test Symposium. This was a 4-day event, in “snow[y] and cold” Sapporo, Japan.

…so to speak. This is my 200th post. Woo-hoo!! Maybe not my 200th good one, but here it is!

In the bigger blogging world, it’s not so great - for 34 months of blogging - almost three years and 200 posts, that’s about a post and a half per week. In a blogosphere where multiple posts per day is the norm (well, at least the most popular blogs), a post per week is not stellar. But I do have a day job. And, for the EDA blogging world, well, it’s not so bad.

Another October has come and gone, and those determined folks who do their best to ensure that only good electronic components and systems are shipped to customers will be making their way back to the home base. That’s it for the 2008 version of the International Test Conference. So what were the big ‘take-aways’ of this years conference?