There are other DFT tools, too!
If I may state the obvious, I am one guy, who has led one career, and therefore has a limited base of experience from which to draw. So when it comes to writing about Design-for-Test methodology and tools, those of you reading are getting a fairly narrow view of the wide world of DFT. I admit it. And I believe I’ve said from the beginning that one of the reasons for this blog in the first place was to get me to peak out of my box a little - learn and explore.
So to that end, I decided to look beyond the big few EDA vendors and their test-related offerings to some of the smaller companies and the variety of different technologies beyond scan, ATPG, and BIST that are offered.
As it turns out, there is a spectrum of DFT-related products that spans all the way from RTL design-for-test tools to silicon defect diagnosis tools that analyze ATPG failures. You may recognize the latter as that which is classified as a fairly popular DFM methodology these days.
But it’s not all just EDA software. There has been, for many years, a class of ATE called DFT testers. These are testers targeted mostly for design debug, have toned-down specs, and a much smaller footprint as compared to the “big iron” ATE marketed by Advantest, Teradyne, Credence, LTX, etc.
There’s a lot to cover in that spectrum, so stay tuned. I’ll look at RTL design-for-test first, and make my way toward the back-end of the flow…
July 16th, 2007 at 8:54 pm
[...] task which is becoming more integrated with the design flow as time goes on. As I mentioned in my previous post, there are DFT-related tools spanning the range from RTL to the extreme back-end (which fall into [...]
July 26th, 2007 at 9:40 pm
[...] a couple of previous posts, here, and here, I started discussing different design-for-test tools - you know, other than your [...]