DFT Digest

As I mentioned in my last post, I asked a few friends and acquaintances what they were looking forward to at ITC this year. My next respondent is Mohammad Tehranipoor of University of Connecticut.

Mohammad is, as he mentions below, the Program Chair of the workshop titled DBT: IEEE Workshop on Current- and Defect-Based Testing. I think this topic will be promising to a long time to come. Somehow we’re going to have evolve our fault models to maintain and improve test quality.

Dr. Tehranipoor answered each of my questions specifically, so you, the reader can make your judgment as to whether the questions were good or bad. Whatever the case, the answers are good. Remember, the text in italics are my thoughts not his.

1) What do you see as the most compelling/interesting directions of the technical content this year?
The focus of this year’s ITC is on facing nanometer technology test challenges. I look forward to technical sessions on DFT/DFM, yield and adaptive tests. Among traditional tracks, I look forward to delay testing papers. Among keynote addresses, I would like to see Ken Butler’s talk on Pinning Down This Elusive Thing Called “Adaptive Test”.

2) How do these directions compare with last year?
Last year there were more focus on getting more out of test and more focus on test quality, yield, test compression and diagnosis.

3) Looking forward to any interesting fringe meetings/activities?
Magma’s luncheon meeting — Magma is releasing new physically aware ATPG
DBT workshop because of it’s excellent program — Note: I’m DBT Program chair
Ahh, the new Magma tool. I’m really interested for the details to come out on this. Actually, Dr. Tehranipoor will be a featured guest at the Magma lunch, giving a talk to “discuss the need to bring layout, timing and variation information into DFT/ATPG”. Count me bought in on that notion…

4) If there was any event that you would tell people not to miss, what would it be?
Besides DBT, I’d say invited addresses.

I’d like to thank Mohammad for contributing his answers and giving us all another view of what’s going on at ITC!