News Briefs

At a press event held June 12 in conjunction with the IEEE MTT-S International Microwave Symposium, participants touted RF products that will point the way to the "mobile living room." Vendors of test and test-related products included Cascade Microtech, which highlighted its M150 DC-to-220-GHz measurement platform, and W.L. Gore, which exhibited its Phaseflex 110-GHz test assemblies (pictured).

Speaker Jim Cable, Peregrine CEO, used the "mobile living room" phrase in his address concluding the event. The mobile living room, Cable said, is enabled by portable devices that enable you to carry with you all the comforts of home: your phone, camera, television, and games, for example. Enabling such mobile devices, he contended, will be products such as his firm's CMOS SOCs. Peregrine used the event to debut RoHS-compliant RF switches.

Another speaker, Jim Norling, marketing director at Freescale, described how his firm will use high-voltage RF power technology combined with low-cost over-molded plastic packaging to expand into industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) applications. Norling noted that the expansion was spawned by the development of Freescale's 50-V VHV6 RF LDMOS technology (very high-voltage sixth-generation RF laterally diffused metal oxide semiconductor), a 50-V enhancement to Freescale's 28-V LDMOS technology.

Mentor Graphics has announced that ATI Technologies has implemented Mentor's TestKompress embedded deterministic test (EDT) tool. ATI used Modular TestKompress, a new block-level implementation of Mentor's EDT methodology that improves compression performance and routing on large, complex devices.

"Working closely with Mentor Graphics, we were able to use the TestKompress product to thoroughly test our new chip at no additional test cost," said Michael Do, design for test (DFT) architect at ATI Technologies.

The Modular TestKompress tool implements an embedded compression scheme at the block level that reduces the size of the test sets required for complex designs, enabling comprehensive test coverage without sacrificing test throughput. Modular TestKompress provides designers with a block-based flow whereby each block, along with associated compression logic, can be implemented and verified independently. The tool simplifies the design flow for large block-based designs and reduces the routing area needed to connect the compression hardware.

The TestKompress tool fits easily into most scan-based design flows and offers the same at-speed test capabilities as Mentor Graphics' FastScan automatic test pattern generation (ATPG) tool. The TestKompress tool's patented compression capabilities reduce the amount of test data required for the detection of the speed-related defects that are more prevalent at nanometer process technologies. www.mentor.com/products/dft.

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) along with RF Micro Devices and IBM Semiconductor R&D Center have developed a new method for measuring very faint thermal noise in electronic circuits. The researchers say the technique may help improve the signal range, data rate, and battery life of cell phones and other wireless communications devices.

The researchers have been focusing on inexpensive CMOS transistors, which are used in ICs for wireless devices. The noise levels for CMOS transistors have typically been too low to measure accurately in much of their signal frequency range (1–10 GHz). The technique measures the noise in CMOS devices before they are cut from silicon wafers and packaged. NIST says this may be the first method for on-wafer noise measurements directly linked to national standards for thermal noise power.

The team has also made use of "reverse" noise measurements—focusing on noise emitted from the input of the transistor when incoming signals are reflected and scattered—as a tool for checking noise parameters. They say this method can improve precision, particularly of the optimal impedance properties needed in transistors to minimize noise, and that reverse noise measurements also may help improve modeling of CMOS transistors. www.nist.gov.

JDSU's T-BERD 6000 performs the same optical measurements as larger units but in a more portable size. The T-BERD 6000 can perform the measurements needed to test optical access networks, metro networks, and core transport networks.

The T-BERD 6000 has built-in measurement functions that include a fault locator, power meter, and optical loss test set. You can add functions from a set of more than 40 measurement modules, including a spectrum analyzer, a polarization-mode dispersion analyzer, a chromatic-dispersion meter, and a very-long-range (VLR) optical time-domain reflectometer (OTDR). An ultra-long-haul module has a 50-dB dynamic range at 1550 nm. It can store up to 128,000 measurements with an 0.1-s sweep. An optional optical-talkset function lets you communicate along a fiber. And an automatic bidirectional analysis function cuts test time by 50% for OTDR, insertion loss (IL), and optical return loss (ORL) measurements, which otherwise use single-directional testing.

The instrument shows results on an 8.4-in. display (touch screen optional). The main unit can store test results and transfer them to a PC over USB and Ethernet links. PC software lets you analyze and store data offline. The T-BERD is powered by a lithium-ion battery. Base price: $2990. JDSU, www.jdsu.com.

The Advanced Design System (ADS) 2006A high-frequency EDA software features design links from Agilent's Genesys software, which the company acquired with its purchase of Eagleware, to speed the generation of complex, high-frequency system and circuit designs. ADS 2006A also includes system-simulation enhancements that allow wireless designers to move seamlessly among RFIC/package/board design, system design, and test equipment.

The new capabilities in ADS 2006A include WhatIF, an intermediate frequency (IF) planning tool for RF system architects; Spectrasys, a continuous-spectrum RF system simulator with root-cause analysis; and Synthesis, eight design assistants that implement manufacturable circuit-level designs, such as precise image-reject filters for RF boards.

ADS 2006A also includes several enhancements, including accelerated layout connectivity and performance on large monolithic millimeter-wave integrated circuits (MMICs) and reticles, and faster circuit and EM simulators that support 64-bit computer architectures to solve design problems that were too large to compute with 32-bit architectures five years ago. Base price: $8400. Available in October. Agilent Technologies, www.agilent.com.

EMC Symposium, August 14–18, Portland, OR. Sponsored by IEEE, EMC Society. www.emc2006.org.

EOS/ESD Symposium, September 10–15, Tucson, AZ. Sponsored by ESD Association. www.esda.org/symposia.html.

Autotestcon, September 18–21, Anaheim, CA. Sponsored by IEEE. www.autotestcon.com.

To learn about other conferences, courses, and calls for papers, visit www.tmworld.com/events.