DFT Digest

It’s Thursday morning, third day of the International Test Conference, last day of the technical paper sessions (Workshops start tomorrow). If you’re an ITC attendee, you may be hung over from too much cheese at the wine and cheese event - any good scuttlebutt? Do tell…

Yesterday, the reports (here and here) from the first day speeches hit the web. Most covered the keynote speech, given by Gadi Singer of Intel, who talked about the massive increase in IC complexity. Moore’s law, alive and well. He stated Mips/cubic feet has increased 100x every 10 years. Hmmm… do I smell a new law? ‘Singer’s Law’? Moore has been trying to disavow his law for years - these Intel guy’s and their laws…

DFT Digest also had our man at the keynote. Siyad adds this about what Mr. Singer had to say: “He mentioned that the main challenges were from 4 directions: complexity of the new designs, ever increasing of performance while keeping power constant, complexity of nanometer technologies, and pressures of time-to-market”.

Singer said that the laws of increasing complexity were not going to be broken in the foreseeable future. Part of the reason that this is true is that design process have moved increasingly into IP, with more modularity, and more reuse. Test and Verification, however, have not kept with rapid change, so he challanged the audience to come up with new solutions, including more up-front planning, modularity and adaptive methods to keep up with the rapid pace.

Speaking of adaptive methods, Ken Butler also gave his address on adaptive test on Tuesday. This article covered that talk, and I’ll blog on on it later, because I find it very interesting.