Serdes BIST ATE Option Takes Aim At Digital-Home Frontier
Rick Nelson, Chief Editor -- Test & Measurement World, 4/19/2004
Santa Clara, CA. Taking aim at the next frontier for the electronics industry, Agilent Technologies (www.agilent.com/see/bistassist) has introduced the BIST Assist 6.4 option for its 93000 SOC Series semiconductor test systems.
The frontier in question, says Tom Newsom, Agilent VP and general manager of the company's SOC business unit, is the digital home. BIST Assist 6.4's role, he says, is to support fast, cost-effective test of the serial I/O devices that will tie together the many communications and entertainment products that populate this new frontier--including the terabyte of data capacity that will be needed to store movies and other entertainment content.
For Newsom, the digital home represents not a single "next big thing"--such as the personal computer or the Internet--that will single-handedly drive semiconductor sales. Instead, he says, many little things will combine to drive the industry forward. As an example of such little things, he cites the sale of cell phone ring tones, which exceeded $3 billion last year, according to a report from Reuters. Cell phones and other mobile devices, says Newsom, fall within his conception of the next frontier in that they enable consumers to take some of the digital comforts of home with them when they travel.
To address this frontier, Newsom says Agilent will debut a variety of 93000 Series options, with BIST Assist 6.4 being the first to appear.
BIST Assist 6.4 enables signal-integrity testing of high-speed serial links at rates to 6.4 Gbps using an approach that combines loopback testing, using a DUT's BIST functionality, with the ability to modify the data fed back, by injecting jitter, for example. Newsom estimates that BIST Assist offers 50% savings over conventional at-speed production-test approaches. A fully configured 93000 with BIST Assist costs $995,000; it will test a PCI Express bridge device requiring 64 pins at 6.4 Gbps and up to 256 digital pins at 400 Mbps. Upgrades start at $200,000.
BIST Assist 6.4 provides at-speed level control and up to 430 ps of adjustable jitter injection to exercise high-speed link performance. Calibrated at the test head, BIST Assist eliminates the drift that can plague measurements using so-called golden devices, and it provides for significant fault-coverage improvements, compared with standalone loopback tests. In addition to PCI Express, BIST Assist will test Serial ATA, Fibre Channel, and Serial RapidIO devices.
For more on testing high-speed serial I/O devices, see the Test & Measurement World May 2004 issue.
