Link This |
Email this |
Blog This |
Comments (0)
ITC: Instruments are relocating
October 25, 2007
Instruments are moving off your bench and into your chips. That’s the message one might have taken away from an International Test Conference address titled “The need for Standard and Efficient Interconnection and Access of Embedded Everything” by Inovys chief scientist Al Crouch. He’s been poking around in other people’s chips, he said, and he’s found a variety of embedded instruments based on technologies from companies including DAFCA, Cisco, ARM, and ASE.
Such instruments are necessary, he said, to help silicon makers keep up with Moore’s law and to serve in applications ranging from debug to yield enhancement to system-level troubleshooting. Dense chips and stacked-die multichip packages, he said, require significant debug infrastructure to get them up and running. As for system-level test, he said that a chip might work fine when it’s plugged into a $10,000 load board connected to a $2 million ATE system. But when you pack it onto a 5x5-in. board with ten other chips and connect it to a $35 power supply, it might turn out not to work so well. Embedded instruments, he said, can provide the only way of finding out exactly what’s going on while avoiding no-trouble-found round trips to a tester.
But the proliferation of embedded instruments, he said, presents its own problems involving the need to communicate with them effectively. He added that second-order effects—embedded instruments within embedded instruments—further complicate matters.
Today’s efforts to communicate with embedded instruments are mainly ad hoc, he said, with debug, yield, and system-troubleshooting personnel pursuing their own agendas without regard to what others are doing. He concluded that the IEEE P1687 internal JTAG initiative can provide an effective way for orderly, standardized embedded-instrument communication and control.
He concluded by saying that chip designers can’t really design just for the chip itself today—they must design for the wafer-level and end-system environment as well, as embedded content continues to grow.
In related ITC news, Asset InterTech announced that it has expanded its embedded-instrument support.
Posted by Rick Nelson on October 25, 2007 | Comments (0)
