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Where designers might say, “how do I build this next big monster that the marketing department is demanding?”, we design-for-test engineers are asking the obvious related question: “How am I going to test this next big monster that the designers are slapping together?” Some days I find myself wishing that we’d do the same chip over so I could dive even deeper into the details of any lost coverage and nail everything down perfectly. No such luck. Perhaps gathering lessons learned will always be #1 on my list of DFT Strategies for SoCs.

… so went the sign-off of a very informative comment by Wern-Yan Koe in a discussion started in the “DFT Experts” group on LinkedIn.  I agree – design-for-test is fun, and challenging.  The technology and methodology [...]

‘Tis true that the first purpose for a blog was to ‘log’ one’s finds on the internet – and I should remember this from time to time.  Earlier this month, there was an article posted in Design [...]

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

John provided a good overview of embedded memory repair techniques in his Memory Repair Basics post late last year. Although there’s been some limited adoption of memory repair at 90nm, at 65 and 45nm it’s a whole different story. In fact, at 45nm, it’s becoming the norm. But, like any new product, there’s a fair amount of uncertainty about when to use memory repair and how much is too much. (Yes, you can have too much of a good thing). Let’s see if I can clear up some of the confusion with a few (hopefully) helpful tips.

Just a quick note tonight – in the last couple of weeks we did a couple of adjustments on DFT Forum, in case you thought it looked a little different.

First, we migrated it from one server to the other (hopefully transparent to you, valued participant), then updated the theme to match DFT Digest. Then, I upgraded the forum software to the most recent, supported version. I think that actually solved a recent problem with spammy new registrations. I think I only lost one post in this transition (sorry).