Diamond advances amid merger process

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Credence and LTX executives remain mum on long-term plans to rationalize product lines in light of the two firms’ plan to merge, but on the Credence side, development continues apace on instrumentation for the Diamond platform. The latest entry is the 72-channel HDVI (high-density voltage/current) instrument, which is targeted at reducing the cost of test by enabling large numbers of sites to be tested in parallel.

In a phone interview with Arun Kancharla, product marketing manager at Credence, and Thomas Vana, marketing director for the Diamond platform, Kancharla said that the new instrument—and in fact the entire Diamond platform—targets high-volume consumer-electronics devices such as microcontrollers, programmable logic devices (PLDs), FPGAs, gate arrays, DSPs, and embedded controllers used in audio, video, wireless-cellular, digital-camera, baseband, and power-management applications. That’s in keeping with a Credence focus on low-cost test for small- to moderate-scale chips that was described by Lavi Lev, Credence’s president and CEO, in January.

One might infer a bright future for the Diamond platform despite the inability of Credence and LTX to state a long-term product rationalization plan at this point in the merger process. Vana said the Diamond has “stickiness”—as 250 of the platforms are installed worldwide; double-digit growth in device volumes suggest additional opportunities for Diamond adoption. Vana added that customers deploy the low-cost systems to keep test costs down so they can remain profitable as average selling prices of consumer chips fall. With Diamonds having a base price of $60,000, Vana said, customers can deploy them in their labs for code development as well as on the factory floor.

Vana said a customer can unpack a Diamond, plug it in, and be up and running in 10 minutes. Kancharla added that the new HDVI increases the flexibility of already-deployed Diamonds—replacing four 16-channel instruments with a 72-channel HDVI frees up three slots for other instruments. In total, the HDVI permits up to 432 V/I channels on the Diamond 10 and up to 1728 V/I channels on the Diamond 40—at a price, Vana said, of as low as $1500 per channel. As to how many V/I channels a customer might actually need, Vana said that one customer was evaluating a 1200-channel system for massively parallel test at wafer probe. Kancharla commented that another customer deployed a high-channel-count Diamond to implement a 100-site strip test, reducing test costs by 40%.

In addition, he said, a customer reduced capital costs by 30% by deploying the Diamond platform in an eight-site production test program for large GPS baseband processors; another cut capital costs by 40% in a 16-site Bluetooth device test program.

As for the future of expensive big-iron ATE, Vana said he has seen a customer bring up chips on a high-end tester but transfer the test job to Diamond platforms. As for the future of the LTX and Credence platforms, Vana would only say that while the merger goes forward, customers still need to reduce their cost of test.