Disciplines merge, but who pays?
By Rick Nelson, Editor in Chief -- Test & Measurement World, 11/1/2008 2:00:00 AM
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This final “Design, Test & Yield” column of 2008 presents an opportunity to address the interactions of these three fields throughout the year and to suggest trends that will evolve in 2009.
First, design and test grow ever closer together. Exemplifying that trend is National Instruments (NI). Mike Santori, business and technology fellow at NI, said last summer, “Over the last few years, we’ve begun to talk about ourselves as a design company…. NI products are now used by engineers and scientists to implement systems embedded in the product that they are trying to develop” (Ref. 1).
NI’s latest effort in the blending of design and test is its October announcement of a beta version of a connectivity toolkit for the NI Multisim and LabView platforms (figure) that bridges the gap between design and test to reduce design errors and iterations.
 A beta connectivity toolkit links MultiSim and LabView. Courtesy of National Instruments. |
With design and test edging closer together, instruments are getting designed into chips (Ref. 2). Although EDA vendor Synopsys offers some on-chip instrumentation functionality (see "Analog effects complicate digital test"), on-chip instrument implementations remain primarily the domain of chip makers. Peter L. Levin, founder, president, and CEO of Dafca, one independent supplier of on-chip instrument technology, told me last month that “You would think on-chip instrumentation would be an emerging part of the EDA segment,” but that—at least for now—this is not the case. (For more on Dafca, see the EDN Global Innovators 2008 article, "On-chip instruments track malicious RTL.")
As for yield, Phil Burlison, a director of advanced technology at Verigy who came to the company when it purchased Inovys in January, said tools can analyze and convert test-failure data into indicators of design and process problems. But the emergence of such tools poses the question: Who pays for them? An International Test Conference panel organized by Burlison was to address that question in October. I’ll report on the panel online at www.tmworld.com. But it’s safe to assume that the question of who pays will continue throughout 2009.
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