DFT Digest

March what?  Holy smoke, time flies – It’s been one of those stretches of time where I’ve just been overwhelmed with my day job, and other parts of life – and I’ve not posted here at DFT Digest for quite awhile. I feel a little bit like the donkey in the picture to the left: so overloaded, it’s hard to make any progress!

Obviously it doesn’t mean that nothing’s been going on in the world of Design-for-Test, just that I haven’t transferred it to the blog. My bad.  Sure would be nice to have some guest posters to keep the flow, even when I’m to busy (well there is Steve Pateras, who has posted a couple of very compelling articles, which consistently get a good flow of comments).  Anyone else like to write?  Have something to say?  If so, e-mail me.  Let’s talk.

But what else is going on?  Well, plenty, I suppose. In the EDA world in general, DVCon, DesignCon, ISQED and SNUG all have just passed (and ESC is just around the corner).  These are not really DFT-centric conferences, but a couple of interesting things came from them:  one, they have all been, to one degree or another, twittered.  The second was a fairly detailed tutorial at SNUG by Synopsys’ Adam Cron on the features and power-aware methodologies of DFT MAX and TetraMAX.

So what is this “twitter” I speak of?  Well, Twitter is what I would call a “micro-blogging” tool, where a person can write whatever, 140 characters at a time, and post it for whomever happens to follow their feed.  If you’ve been watching the news, in the past 2-3 months, you are sure to have heard it mentioned at least once.

In our industry, their are quite a few twitterers, notably JL Gray (Verilab), Karen Bartleson (Synopsys),  Harry Gries (the ASIC guy), Dennis Brophy (Mentor), James Colgan (Xuropa) – I could go on.   I twitter, also (as john_m_ford), although, I’m not quite as prodigious as some of these other people. Folks, it’s worth a look.  This is just one way that our industry is communicating today.

Take for example, DVCon.  Although I won’t say it was evenly covered (as in all sessions and events covered), there were parts, such as the EDA executive panel moderated by Peggy Aycinena (believe it or not, John Cooley, she misses you!), that were covered very well.  JL and Karen both twittered the hour long panel discussion, live, reporting the questions and answers, along with their viewpoints along the way.  It was fascinating – almost like I was there.

Anyway, enough of Twitter – check it out if you haven’t.  It’s a worthwhile communication tool when used right.

Back to DFT - I mentioned Adam Cron’s tutorial at SNUG.  If you have a SolvNet account, you can go to the SNUG proceedings page for 2009, go almost all the way down to the end of the page – it’s tutorial WC2: Galaxy Test: Power-Aware DFT/ATPG and Technical Updates.  It’s 92 pages of slides on how DFT MAX and TetraMAX address test-power issues, as well as some highlights of recent versions of the tools.  Good stuff.

What else is going on?  Well there have been a few company announcements, which I think I’ll post in the “Industry News” section in the next couple of days.That section has been sorely ignored as of late.

[update] Tomorrow, the 16th Annual Test Synthesis Workshop commences, in Austin.  Take a look at the ITSW final program for details.

DATE ‘09 is coming up.  There is an article describing the Test Track here, and according to it, there are about 8 seesions, 2 tutorials, and 2 workshops that are test-related.

This Thursday for all you SoCal engineers, the EDA Tech Forum (sponsored by Altera, Mentor, ARM and others) will be held in Irvine, or Newport Beach, depending upon what web-page you happen to be reading, with a keynote by Dr. Stephen Squyers of the Mars Exploration Rover Project. I’d go, but there’s nothing very DFT-related happening. There are a couple of yield analysis and DFM sessions, though.  The EDA Tech Forum seems like some kind of a traveling road show, appearing in spots around the US, in the pacific rim and Europe throughout the year.

As I’ve already blogged, the Southwest DFT Conference is in Austin, in about a week (Apr 2-3).  Still no word, as far as I know, what the subjects of the keynote (Janusz Rajski) or the panel discussion will be.  But it’s worth checking out.