Cadence teams with IBM on Cell processor testability
-- Test & Measurement World, 4/24/2006 10:50:00 AM
Cadence Design Systems has announced a cooperative effort with IBM under which the companies have deployed Cadence's Encounter Test product line to exceed testability and manufacturing-diagnostics goals for the Cell Broadband Engine.
The cooperation between Cadence and IBM enabled high test coverage to ensure outgoing quality and achieved lower manufacturing cost with test data compression. It also included the use of a low pin-count tester and resulted in faster yield ramp with Encounter Diagnostics.
Developed by Sony, Toshiba, and IBM (STI), the Cell Broadband Engine is a multi-core Power Architecture-based microprocessor optimized for compute-intensive workloads and various broadband media applications, including computer entertainment.
“We have worked very closely with Cadence on the test and diagnostics aspects of the Cell Broadband Engine,” said Kathryn Papermaster, development director for the STI Design Center, IBM Systems & Technology Group. “Using Encounter Test, we were able to address all of the demanding test requirements of the Cell Broadband Engine, while exceeding our objectives for test coverage, test cost and diagnostics, enabling us to achieve our quality and cost goals for this product.”
The Encounter Test technologies used in the Cell Broadband Engine include True-Time ATPG test, with pipelined scan control to support near 4-GHz operation, and OPMISR+ compression to lower cost of test and to support custom BIST for logic and memory. In addition, the flow included Encounter Diagnostics, used to accelerate yield ramp in manufacturing environments.
“The Cell Broadband Engine is a major achievement for IBM, Sony and Toshiba. It is a great honor for Encounter Test to contribute to this success," said James Miller Jr., executive VP of the products and technologies organization at Cadence. “Cooperating with our leading customers in projects such as the Cell Broadband Engine helps ensure that we will continue to provide the industry with products that exceed our customers’ expectations.”
Cadence and IBM are members of power.org, which is a community of companies driving innovation around Power Architecture technology.
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