Software key to effective use of ATE hardware

Rick Nelson, Editorial Director -- Test & Measurement World, 9/1/2011 12:00:00 AM

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Semicon West was the venue for major ATE (automated test equipment) news, with Advantest touting its acquisition of Verigy. While Advantest and Verigy executives presented a united front at a July 12 press conference, Advantest and Verigy engineers proceeded on divergent paths as they debuted new modules for their T2000 and V93000 platforms. Not to be outdone by its newly constituted competitor, Teradyne announced new modules for its UltraFLEX platform.

James T. Healy, GM of Sony LSI Design, adopted a nautical theme to classify ATE players when he addressed the co-located ATE Vision 2020 workshop on July 14. He said the industry is populated by small Nemos (alluding to the boy clownfish protagonist of the 2003 Finding Nemo film) that come and go with the tide and are often eaten by the behemoth Bemos (who can become sick on their diet of Nemos). The third category, he said, are the Remos, who renovate repossessed or fully depreciated testers to test today’s devices.

Yet another class of ATE provider, represented at Semicon West by Aeroflex, Geotest, and National Instruments, offers low-cost PXI-based systems (with Aeroflex adding AXIe as well). Following Healy’s nomenclature, I’ll call these  companies Memos—multifaceted vendors adding IC test to their menu of applications served. Far from looking to become food for the Bemos, they are looking to eat some of the Bemos’ lunch.

So from a hardware standpoint, customers can choose from a range of options. Unfortunately, hardware is only part of the problem, as presenters at the ATE Vision 2020 workshop made clear. Chris Lemoine of LTX-Credence said his customers invest millions of dollars in ATE software, and they want to protect that investment as hardware changes. Pete Hodakievic of AMD noted that great software can hide poor hardware, but great hardware can be 100% handicapped by poor software.

ATE vendors are addressing the software issue. For example, Peter Huber of Teradyne described his work on UTSL (Universal Test Specification Language), which imposes a slight test-time penalty but drastically speeds test-program development for automotive-device test. ATE customers are mounting their own efforts. Radford Nguyen of AMD described his company’s Unified Platform Architecture—a software framework for rapid test-program development for any available ATE platform.

Software firms are contributing as well. Geir Eide of Mentor Graphics teamed up with Markus Seuring of Verigy to describe an ATE-to-EDA connection through STDF V4-2007 that enables fast and robust scan-fail data collection. And Dan Glotter of OptimalTest, departing from Healy’s nautical metaphors, said OptimalTest has paved the semiconductor information superhighway across the supply chain to support real-time data collection, secure data transfer, and data analysis.

Hodakievic concluded by noting that millennial engineers want to focus their creative energies on solving problems, not building toolkits. To that end, he said to general agreement, test engineers need an ATE app store. T&MW

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