DFT Digest

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Sometimes life gets so busy, I gloss over many things especially when it comes to e-mails, scheduling, where I parked my car – you know, life. Eventually, as an event starts to creep up on me, I gather everything I glossed over in one place so I can quickly organize my time and thoughts, so I don’t go headlong into things completely unprepared. I suppose I’m no different than many of you out there. But one thing I glossed over until earlier this week, I still haven’t resolved.

There’s not been a ton of talk about the recently announced agreement between Mentor Graphics and LogicVision (it’s test-related, after all), but a few comments and blog posts out there on the intertubes have me wondering whether people put any effort into these things at all.

Today it was announced that Mentor Graphics and LogicVision have put pen to paper on a deal that will, if all goes to plan, make LogicVision a wholly owned subsidiary of Mentor. The move will cost Mentor $13 million in Mentor common stock (0.2006 MENT shares per LGVN share). Oh, as the EDA world turns…

Wow, it’s been so long since I done “in-the-news”, this might get to be a long post… the DFT world moves on whether I have time to document it or not!

The following are a selection of press releases from the first quarter of this year; I’ll follow up with more DFT in-the-news – beacause there is more to the industry than press releases!

[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.