ICs for cars, homes, or both?

How many ATE platforms are in your future? Understandably, test engineering managers want to minimize the training, program development, and service costs of multiple platforms. And ATE makers themselves can benefit from a single-platform strategy. LTX (www.ltx.com), for example, found that its single-platform approach helped it outsource the manufacture of its Fusion HF system (see News Briefs). "Most of our competitors have multiple platforms, which increases manufacturing complexity," says Dave Tacelli, LTX's president and COO. Fusion's modularity, he says, made it easy to transfer manufacturing to Jabil Circuit (www.jabil.com), whose manufacturing expertise can help cut lead times by as much as 75%. Not all ATE makers agree with the single-platform approach. Credence Systems (www.credence.com) promotes different platforms tailored to different applications ranging from the Octet for high-speed system-on-chip (SOC) devices to the ASL Series for standard low-cost, mixed-signal and RF components. Not content with that lineup, in January Credence acquired SZ Testsysteme and that company's Piranha, Falcon, and Kodiak platforms.

The SZ Testsysteme Falcon will soon be wearing a Credence Systems name tag.

Tom Newsom, VP and general manager of Agilent Technologies' SOC test business unit (www.agilent.com), doesn't buy the multiple-platform approach. Agilent is betting that its single-platform 93000 Series can adapt to the test needs of emerging SOC devices. A low-cost, focused tester may be great for testing one chip of today's five-chip set, Newsom says, but it may be useless when those five chips have been integrated into one. "The most expensive tester," he says, "is the one collecting dust instead of testing chips."

Agilent isn't ceding the automotive chip-test market to its competitors. Much of the growing semiconductor content of cars includes devices that make a car more like a home, enabling entertainment and voice and data communications. Such devices, says Newsom, are the ones most effectively tested using a scalable single platform like the 93000.

Newsom concedes that there may be a home for focused systems that test the chips that make a car more like a car—engine control units and window controllers, for example. Odds are, the general trend toward platform convergence will see persistent interruptions as focused testers emerge to test low-pin-count, low-cost, high-volume devices.

Rick Nelson, Executive Editor, rnelson@tmworld.com