Leveraging Physically Aware Design-For-Test To Improve Area, Power, And Timing


Increased pressures on design teams to deliver faster, smaller devices in less time has required EDA companies to develop an integrated methodology to incorporate physical design information during DFT synthesis. This solution must consider the placeable area (or size) of the circuit as well as routing blockages and hard macro placement locations. It must also be able to both model the wiring i... » read more

Divide And Conquer: Hierarchical DFT For SoC Designs


Large System on Chip (SoC) designs present many challenges to all design disciplines, including design-for-test (DFT). By taking a divide-and-conquer approach to test, significant savings in tool runtime and memory consumption can be realized. This whitepaper describes the basic components of a hierarchical DFT methodology, the benefits that it provides, and the tool automation that is availabl... » read more

Balancing The Cost Of Test


As semiconductor devices became larger and more complex, the cost of [getkc id="174" kc_name="test"] increased. Testers were large pieces of capital equipment designed to execute functional vectors at-speed and the technology being used had to keep up with increasing demands placed on them. Because of this, the cost of test did not decrease in the way that other high-tech equipment did. Around ... » read more

Addressing Test Cost Challenges In LPCT Designs


As companies strive to achieve higher quality and reliability for their products, and as package sizes and the number of available pins continue to shrink, there is also a persistent need to keep test costs down. Low Pin Count Test (LPCT) is one solution that Design for Test (DFT) designers turn to, and in many cases, might be the only one available to address these conflicting requirements. ... » read more

Test Challenges Grow


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss current and future test challenges with Dave Armstrong, director of business development at Advantest; Steve Pateras, product marketing director for Silicon Test Solutions at Mentor Graphics; Robert Ruiz, senior product marketing manager at Synopsys; Mike Slessor, president of FormFactor; and Dan Glotter, chief executive of Optimal+. SE: In our ... » read more

DFTMAX Compression Shared I/O


A significant design trend in recent years has been the widespread use of ARM multicore processors in systems-on-chip (SoCs). Designers’ ability to easily and cost-effectively employ multiple, high-performance embedded processors to meet the computational demands of the end application has helped fuel the explosive growth in mobile computing, networking infrastructure, and digital infotainmen... » read more

DFTMAX Compression Shared I/O


A significant design trend in recent years has been the widespread use of ARM multicore processors in systems-on-chip (SoCs). Designers’ ability to easily and cost-effectively employ multiple, high-performance embedded processors to meet the computational demands of the end application has helped fuel the explosive growth in mobile computing, networking infrastructure, and digital infotainmen... » read more

Testing One, Two, Three


The sheer number of off-the-shelf parts that are showing up in ICs these days—and that includes both hard and soft parts—means that to a large extent we are designing and manufacturing a series of interconnected black boxes. Black boxes, at least in theory, are a major time saver. The idea that you can put together a series of well-designed, state-of-the-art Lego-like blocks that are pro... » read more

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