DFT-related DAC news
This week, I’ll try to pass along Design-for-Test related DAC news as it comes along…
First, it was announced today that the standards organization Accellera has selected Bruce Cory, a DFT manager at NVIDIA, to receive the 5th annual Technical Excellence Award, for leading the effort to bring the Open Compression Interface (OCI) to be approved by the Accellera membership, and continuing the effort to pass it as an IEEE standard (IEEE 1450.6.1, which I guess is an extension to the CTL standard).
The OCI standard will be an important step in establishing tool independence with regard to test data compression and diagnosis, while still protecting EDA vendor’s compression IP. Currently, once test compression IP from a certain vendor is incorporated into a design, ATPG tools from the same company must be used, as well as any other tool down the line (yield analysis, for example) that hopes to use ATPG data. This can get particularly problematic, especially in manufacturing and test environments that would have to support as many tool flows as there are test compression schemes.
Also today, LogicVision announced the Dragonfly Test Platform, which will be demonstrated at DAC. The new tool seems to be an integration of existing, and in some cases improved versions of LogicVision’s embedded test tools addressing memory BIST and logic BIST, as well as debug and analysis tools such as Silicon Insight and Yield insight.
Earlier this month Genesys Testware announced announced yet another Design-for-X tool: Design-for-Leakage-Test (DFLT). This is actually a feature added to their Hierarchical DFT tool, HiertestMaker, and addresses problems due to lack of testability around power-aware design structures, such as “power switches, and isolations gates”, and I assume level-shifters. Here’s the press release. Someone over at Genesys needs to work on their website: you may notice if you go to their homepage, the latest news is from ITC 2006, and the upcoming event is DAC 2007
Winterlogic, maker of the fault simulation tool Z01X will be exhibiting at DAC for the first time.
SynTest will also be exhibiting - stop by and congratulate L.T. Wang for being elected IEEE fellow earlier this year
Nothing test-related for Synopsys, and this is not necessarily DAC-related, but I have to brag that Synopsys has added a link to this blog on their Galaxy DFT page. Mentor, Cadence? Hello? 
May 28th, 2008 at 12:18 am
First off, I want to say that I too added you to my Blogroll today…much overdue I might add.
With respect to the OCI standard, do you have more info on what this is (will be). For instance, will I be able to use Synopsys DFT Compiler, Mentor TestKompress, and Synopsys TetraMax in a single flow? Or am I misunderstanding?
May 28th, 2008 at 6:36 am
Hi Harry:
Thanks for the link! And yes, the flow you mentioned would be possible with OCI, as long as both TestKompress and TetraMAX supported it. The key is that in order to generate vectors for a given compression scheme, an ATPG tool must understand it’s internals.
OCI hopes to add a layer of abstraction between where the compression implementation is expressed in a standard description language. It kinda reminds me of a public-key crypto, I guess.
If you’re interested in all the gory detail, Google “OCI Open Compression Interface draft” and click the first link. It will give you a draft of the standard.
JMF