DFT Digest

OK - enough of the break from writing. The holiday season has come and gone, the new year has started, and I didn’t even write to hail my 2nd anniversary as a DFT blogger. That’s right, New years day marked two whole years of semi-regular writing about whatever happens to creep into my mind about the world of design-for-test. DFT Digest continues to grow as a website, slow and steady, for which I am grateful.

The passing of one year to the other always brings lists, predictions, and resolutions: All the highlights of the passing year, what’s to be in the year to come - and those promises that everyone makes and breaks, usually in the same breath. And every set of highlights, pile of predictions and ridiculous resolution is as different as the snowflakes that fall from the sky this time of year. Just opinions. So why should I bother? Oh that’s right, this is a blog! So what if I’m 2 weeks late…

So, OK here goes: In 2007, Ben Bennetts retires, and Tom Williams receives a lifetime achievement award. Magma DFT is re-animated. Power aware test and small delay-defects go mainstream - Synopsys claims the lead in both. DFT can now live in RTL. Mentor’s compression gets more compressed, whether it needs to or not. Cadence decides DFT was not good enough, and trades in ‘F’ for ‘W’, and tester companies start eating each other. DFT Digest joins DFT Forum. And L.T. Wang of SynTest gets my award for putting out the best DFT books (here and here) out in, like, forever.

Now for the crystal ball: In 2008, L.T. Wang and Michael Bushnell are promoted to IEEE Fellows*. There is continued efforts put into power aware test, small delay-defects, and other unforeseen nastiness associated with 65 and 45nm processes (next year at this time, we’ll be wringing our hands about 22nm as well). NOC (Network-on-chip) test will be a popular topic - multi-core is the future. Everybody will announce inclusion into the next TSMC reference flow.

Resolutions? None I can’t break, but here’s what I’d like to do: Increase DFT Digest readership by an order of magnitude. Write and post more often. Re-design the site and include more useful, organized and informative material. And more fun stuff. Definitely more fun stuff.

’till next time…

* - I cheated - this has already happened!