DFT Digest

Yeah, well OK – I didn’t go to DAC this year. But if you and I have that in common, dear reader – I’m here to tell you that with a little time in front of your computer, you will have missed almost nothing besides the warm handshake of an old or new acquaintance as you might have met them at the premier EDA conference of the year. Certainly, that is the only thing I missed – I would have loved to meet some of the people I’ve come to know (virtually) over the last 3 1/2 years of DFT Digest blogging.

So why do I say you missed almost nothing? Read on…

DAC is just over a week away – and I’ve been making cracks here and there about the lack of test-related material. So I’d like to welcome a counterpoint from Dr. Yervant Zorian, DAC EDA Industry Chair; Vice President and Chief Scientist at Virage Logic (the cv supplied by him – I’m here to tell you his involvement in, and contributions to the EDA and DFT/Test community are much more extensive)

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Lest you think that test is an overlooked design discipline within the Design Automation Conference Technical Program, I’d like to direct your attention to two sessions that should be thought-provoking and insightful discussions on test methodologies.

Need to catch up on a few things… with the onset of the DAC season, there are always some interesting things that pop up, even if the conference is light on test. Here is a small list of items that have passed into my weary view, in no particular order:

image: Al Souza, Potpourri Redux, 2007

OK, so there was this press release that came out a couple of weeks ago, something about ST Micro adopting a new tool from Atrenta, called Spyglass MBIST. I have to admit, when I first saw this press release, I couldn’t help but wonder, between the the memory IP companies that offer BIST insertion for their own memory macros and other DFT vendors that sell BIST implementation tools for various embedded macros, what about this tool is different?

Gary Smith EDA Research comes out with their “Wallcharts” each year, listing all the EDA vendors, broken down by category. Understandably, It’s a wallchart, with lots of names on it, so there is no description of what each company does. So to appease my own curiosity, and as a DFT guy, I thought I’d take his DFT section (which appeared on the CAE EDA 2009 Wallchart) and add my own comments. Click here to read them: