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Has your company bought its last big-ticket ATE system for system-on-chip (SOC) devices? Probably not. Despite innovative design-for-test (DFT) products from EDA companies, SOC devices will continue to sport high-speed serial, RF, video, and other functions that aren’t readily testable using DFT techniques. Nevertheless, you are likely to find that you can meet future test needs economically with a new system that’s not drastically different from one you already have.

Test innovations appearing in 2006 suggest that ATE makers are not intent on developing radically new technologies, as various flavors of systems such as the Advantest T2000, Credence Sapphire, LTX Fusion, and Verigy 93000 have adapted to provide the cost and performance levels you need for emerging deep-submicron designs. Illustrating the attractiveness of stable, standard platforms, Teradyne in October announced the shipment of its 1000th Flex system—to Texas Instruments, which received the first Flex system in 2002.

The Pin Scale HX high-speed extension card for the 93000 SOC tester supports characterization for devices and interfaces with data rates up to 12.8 Gbps. Courtesy of Verigy.

Similarly, LTX expanded its Fusion line with the Fusion LX, a zero-footprint ATE system based on an air-cooled infrastructure that can be configured with up to 20 slots that accommodate the company’s X Series DSP, DC, and power instruments. It’s available in production and engineering configurations.

Other firms have developed new instruments for their existing platforms. Advantest, for example, introduced the BBWGD (Base Band Waveform Generator Digitizer) module for its T2000 test system. The BBWGD accommodates DC, audio, and video as well as baseband signals to address the increasing number of mixed-signal I/O channels appearing on SOC devices.

In addition, Verigy introduced its Pin Scale HX high-speed extension card for the 93000, which supports characterization for devices and interfaces with data rates up to 12.8 Gbps. The Pin Scale HX is designed to provide the signal integrity required for at-speed design characterization and production test of Serdes device interfaces such as PCI Express and HyperTransport.

The most unusual SOC tester debut this year was Advantest Technology Solutions’ Certimax event-based test system. In its initial configuration, the 80-lb system employs PXI cards to provide 128-pin, 125-MHz test capability. Certimax targets semiconductor design verification, however, leaving production-test chores to systems like Advantest’s T2000