Open Compression, Anyone?
Let me hear you say yeah!
Karen Bartleson over at her blog, The Standards Game, issued an invitation to all who care*, to become a part of the balloting process for the IEEE P1450.6.1, “Standard for Describing On-Chip Scan Compression”, or Open Compression Interface. Karen has a short explanation of the idea behind the standard, and I’ve blogged about it here before. It was ratified by Accellera in October of 2006.
Why is this standard important? Because today, if you decide to implement test compression on your device, you are stuck with the tool vendor that sold you that IP - from cradle to grave. I think of test compression as a three-part solution: the logical IP that is implemented on-chip, the ATPG tool that creates the vectors, and the yield analysis tool that interprets failures in those vectors. Since the hardware of the first part is proprietary, the only way for the software of the second and third parts to understand it is for the whole solution to come from the same vendor.
I can think of several ways this is problematic. Can you? The short story is that interoperability is better, and this is the intent of IEEE P1451.6.1.
* I think, in this case, all who care should read “all companies and/or organizations who care”. I don’t believe the balloting is open to individuals. Someone correct me if I’m wrong, and I’ll pay the $40 to vote…
Stumble It!
Yes, you are right - this is an entity-based ballot, not an individual one. Good clarification.
- Karen
Agreed. As adoption of compression is becoming more widespread and implications better realized, EDA customers must actively get involved and push for an effective OCI to drive resource allocation/support.