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It feels good to be right… it does happen sometimes. Back in May, when Mentor Graphics announced its intentions to acquire LogicVision, most folks writing about the deal pointed out a significant overlap in the product offerings of the two companies – surely the move didn’t make much sense (but to be fair, none of them know much about the DFT market). I first blogged the news here, and again here, in response to the overlap arguments. My feeling was that LogicVision brought strengths in some product areas where Mentor was flagging. And, I was right.

[editors note: This post is fifth in a regular series of featured contributions from Stephen Pateras of LogicVision]

As luck (or Murphy) would have it, just when we thought we had the at-speed logic test problem licked, along comes all these power problems. But no need to panic (at least not for this…) because as it turns out, there are a bunch of techniques you can use to deal with this growing challenge.

[editors note: This post is second in a regular series of featured contributions from Stephen Pateras of LogicVision]

One of the most common questions I get about logic BIST is “how can it possibly guarantee the coverage of specific faults if it’s random pattern based?” Well the answer, of course, is that it can’t… But that, it turns out, is irrelevant. Because in the real world, you can only afford a certain amount of test time. And so the relevant question becomes: “What percentage of real defects can you cover in a fixed amount of time?” This is where the high-throughput aspect of logic BIST comes into play. And this is where I like to use my paint brush versus spray gun analogy.

This just in: Magma has licensed its ATPG technology to LogicVision.

Today’s joint press release states that “LogicVision will develop, market and support ATPG and ATPG compression solutions based on advanced technologies developed by Magma”.

If you’ll recall, in October 2007, Magma announced Talus-ATPG, a power-aware ATPG tool to be integrated into the Magma implementation flow. A few months later (June last year). it ceased to exist. Web page vanished, and the party line was that it had been de-prioritized. In the interim, there were some resource shuffles, people, formerly Magma APTG folk, looking for work. Nothing left but a big question mark. Read more…

I suppose this little late-summer/early-autumn heat wave in SoCal makes one want to talk about heat. Makes sense to me – but what’s the excuse for these folks, presumably from the notably cooler Northern California? In the past few days, two different articles were published, one by Chris Allsup and Bill Lloyd of Synopsys, and the other from Anis Uzzaman, Patrick Gallagher, and Edward Malloy, all of Cadence. Both articles addressed the importance of closely considering and taking steps in attempting to put the cap on test-mode power consumption.