ATO 2017: Driven by Necessity


In the aerospace and defense industry, reducing release cycles and preventing program delays have become increasingly difficult. In automotive, consumer demands are driving up test complexity and introducing new costs in areas like infotainment. In response, test managers must find affordable ways to incorporate RF testing for wireless signals and machine vision testing for assisted parking to ... » read more

Logic Analyzers Never Die


Logic analyzers, long a mainstay of chip design, are finding new demand for IoT devices—and frequently in different forms than in the past. Once associated with big, bulky benchtop instruments, this technology has evolved significantly over the past 40 years. In some cases it has been moved into software, where the measurement results are more likely to be viewed upon a laptop screen or a ... » read more

Standardizing Platforms From Characterization To Production


In 1983, the first commercial mobile phone retailed for $3995, almost $10,000 in today’s economy. It supported a single band, weighed almost a kilogram, and was about the size of a brick. Two decades later, a quad-band “world phone” costs a few hundred dollars. Even a basic mobile phone that supports over 20 cellular bands, in addition to Bluetooth, Wireless LAN, and GPS technology, ... » read more

Transistor-Level Defect Diagnosis


Each new semiconductor process node represents exciting opportunities for suppliers of design, manufacturing, test, and failure analysis solutions. A new process means new challenges to solve, and hopefully more money to be made. On the flip side, whenever solutions that address these new challenges are presented, we seldom hear how useful these are to more mature process nodes. One technology ... » read more

Expose Transistor-Level Yield Limiters With Cell-Aware Diagnosis


Cell-aware diagnosis is a new and effective method to perform transistor-level diagnosis to identify defects inside standard cells. It leverages fault models derived from analog simulation and uses a fail data collection and diagnosis flow identical to that of traditional diagnosis. Cell-aware diagnosis in Tessent Diagnosis is the result of over 10 years of research in cell-aware test and was d... » read more

When Exposed To IoT, Big Iron ATE Will Rust


When the first “smart” refrigerators were released in the early 2000s, consumers weren’t sure what to do with them. When Nest released the smart thermostat, though, a revolution happened. Humans were taken out of the loop because the thermostat learned on its own about desired temperature and how quickly it could cool or heat a house. And it could synchronize all of this better than a hum... » read more

Formal’s Roadmap


Formal verification has come a long way in the past five years as it focused on narrow tasks within the verification flow. Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss that progress, and the future of formal technologies, with [getperson id="11306" comment="Raik Brinkmann"], president and CEO of [getentity id="22395" e_name="OneSpin Solutions"]; Harry Foster, chief verification scientist at [g... » read more

Testing the Big Bang of Smart Devices


Thanks to the proliferation of smart devices in the Internet of Things (IoT), it’s a circumstance not unlike the overwhelming sense of wonder and bewilderment that ancient Greek astronomer Ptolemy must have felt when gazing up at a sky full of stars on a clear winter’s night, trying to rationalize the vast tableau before him. But just as we wouldn’t critique early astronomers and philo... » read more

Transforming Testing Through Automation


"Test your code as you write it.” That’s a common mantra heard in many development teams today. However, for too many, that practice remains a lofty goal as opposed to a business reality. They lack the appropriate metrics and processes to make and measure progress and often underestimate the effort required to manage the cultural change. In this paper you will learn how Coverity: Red... » read more

Moving Automotive Test Into The Analog Domain


The amount of electronic content in passenger cars continues to grow rapidly, driven mainly by the integration of various advanced safety features. The industry’s move towards fully autonomous vehicles promises to even further increase the number of these safety features and consequentially, the electronic content required in each vehicle. Recent reports indicate that hundreds of semicondu... » read more

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