ITC: ATE Vision 2020 to see two generations out
Rick Nelson, Chief Editor -- Test & Measurement World, 10/7/2007 5:53:00 AM
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A workshop titled "ATE Vision 2020" will be part of the ITC Test Week activities surrounding this year's International Test Conference in Santa Clara, CA. Scheduled for Thursday and Friday October 25 and 26, the workshop will take a look at where the ATE industry is heading in the near term as well as the far term. I spoke with workshop program chair Scott Davidson of Sun Microsystems about the event.
Q. The title of ATE Vision 2020-does that refer to the year 2020 or the "2020" spec of perfect vision?
A. The latter. The year 2020 is a little bit too far out to predict. The goal of the workshop is to look five to 10 years out.
Q. What's the format of the workshop?
A. Thursday evening will include a one-hour keynote and one-and-a-half-hour panel session, followed by a reception. The workshop will continue all day Friday with paper presentations.
Q. Let's talk about the Thursday evening events, especially the panel. I was fortunate to participate in a Future of ATE, or FATE, panel in 2003. Will this year's panel be similar?
A. No, this panel will be very different. FATE took a serious look at the near-term future of ATE. This year's panel will be a fun panel, in which panelists will propose a number of futuristic ATE architectures. The audience will be playing venture capitalists and will get to vote on the architecture they would most like to support with money. Play money will be passed out to the audience members, who can distribute it any way they want. We'll see which architecture gets the most backing, with a plaque awarded to the winner.
Q. Who is the Thursday evening keynote speaker?
A. Octavio Martinez, director of test engineering at Qualcomm, who also gave a talk at Semicon West. A point he makes is that he wants to hold the cost of test to a certain percentage of ASP—and that's as ASPs drop and complexity increases. How are we going to do that? I'm hoping that panelists Thursday evening and the paper presenters on Friday will address this issue. And by the way I've asked Octavio to stay after his keynote so he can help grill the panelists, who include Steve Comen of TI, Phil Burlison of Inovys, Ron Lesnikowski of Sun, and Kurt Gusinow of Verigy.
Q. Could you describe the Friday papers?
A. We will have four sessions on Friday. The first one is called "The Future of the Industry" and will provide general idea of the test environment of future. One paper will describe test engineers as "defenders of the brand" to emphasize the importance of test engineering. Other papers will take a look at the semiconductor industry of the future and give a customer view of what we are looking for from the ATE of the future.
The next session will look at more specifics of the ATE of the future. One paper will discuss open ATE, another will talk about low-cost testers for evaluation, and yet another will cover board test and diagnosis in the future.
The third session, after lunch, is called "Innovative Test Methods" and will include a paper on noncontact probing methods. Another paper will cover the mining of test data. Yet another paper will cover the use of test data collection for volume diagnostics. The final session will cover the test of the very high-speed analog I/O of the future.
Q. How do workshop papers differ from ITC papers?
A. ITC papers tell what you did. ITC panels talk about current controversies or what you think should be done right away-that is, what the next generation is going to look like. The purpose of this workshop is to skip a generation, so we are really trying to discourage people from talking about what their next-generation tester is going to be. We are trying to look one or two generations beyond that-at stuff that's just barely on the drawing boards and that's mostly just in the minds of the designers. And in fact it's been more difficult than I would have thought to get people to look that far into the future.
Q. Will you repeat this workshop in future years?
A. We'll see. We killed FATE after one year because in 2004 the future looked pretty much the same as in 2003. But for ATE Vision 2020, I think there may be enough material that we don't cover this year that we could hold a similar workshop in the future. In addition, we have a dozen or so industry supporters—ATE and other companies who are willing to support the workshop with money.
Q. Any final comments?
A. Vision ATE 2020 is different from most conferences and workshops in that no one—presenter or attendee—knows more about the future than anyone else. When we talk about two generations out, we are all in the same boat. No one knows exactly what's going to happen, so we are really looking for input from everybody. I would hope that anyone who is frustrated with what the state of the industry is now would come to the panel and say, "I would love it if ATE companies would do this." Everyone can contribute, no matter what your status in the industry is.
www.itctestweek.org
T&MW chief editor Rick Nelson will serve as moderator at the Thursday evening panel.
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