TUG conference celebrates 25 years (Guest commentary)
Tom Munns, Freescale Semiconductor -- Test & Measurement World, 4/22/2008 4:53:00 PM
The Teradyne Users Group (TUG) technical program will convene April 27-30, 2008, in Austin, TX, and you can expect it to follow the recipe that has made TUG meetings successful for the past 25 years. That recipe combines learning, sharing, collaborating, and networking, and those elements will be brought together this year to address mixed signal, RF/wireless, digital, and power-automotive test topics.
The program will also address test infrastructure and production issues, with papers including “A Real-Time Tool for Evaluating Test Solution Repeatability.” Another track will address assembly test for aerospace and defense applications and will include papers such as “Interpreting System Switching Specifications and How They Relate to Waveform Quality.”
In my role as an elected member of the TUG steering committee for the past eight years, I consider myself lucky to be working with a dedicated and professional group of industry users and Teradyne employees. This year, TUG celebrates 25 years of technical information exchange, making it the industry’s longest running customer user group conference.
Teradyne’s board test customers and users founded TUG in 1983. The first meeting was held in Hyannis, MA, and attracted only 20 attendees. Since that initial meeting, TUG has grown to include engineers from all over the world in both the semiconductor and board test industries. To date the largest conference was held in San Diego, CA, in 2000 with over 900 in attendance. This year’s conference features technical papers, panels and poster sessions, as well as tutorials that present the latest in test technology. What makes TUG unique is that it is run by an annually elected steering committee of Teradyne customers, with Teradyne appointed delegates. And, participation at TUG is restricted to licensed users of Teradyne products and those invited by the Steering Committee.
My key technical takeaway from the conference is witnessing the presentation of the best paper award. All attendees are given the opportunity to vote for the best paper presentation. It has been a pleasure as a committee member to witness the best paper award. I can remember a 2001 paper that focused on uncovering pin accuracy. This paper helped many of us understand the true fidelity of the J973 test platform. Also, I remember a paper from the late ‘90s called “Bitmapping Embedded Arrays on PowerPC Microprocessors.” This paper focused on the breakthroughs in yield analysis with advanced memory bitmapping techniques in the late ‘90s on the digital test J9 platform. And, the more recent application paper that share some insight into how to deal with 6-GHz Serdes protocols and IP block testing.
TUG offers a networking opportunity for users at every level, serving as a forum to establish relationships and learn something new from your peers. The Steering Committee has put together a program for this year’s conference that covers a range of test topics, including instrument calibration, characterization, test efficiency, data analysis, test development and debug, and test time reduction. The semiconductor program is three days, and the defense and aerospace program will run for two days. A vendor fair will include various companies providing products and services that interface with Teradyne systems. The TUG experience will truly benefit your job, career, product line, and industry.
The 25th Teradyne Users Group Technical Conference will be held April 27-30, 2008, at the Renaissance Austin Hotel in Austin, Texas. Click here to learn more about TUG and see what some of the users have to say about TUG.
Tom Munns is test and development manager for the multicore products operation at Freescale Semiconductor, and he serves on the TUG steering committee.
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