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STC celebrates, evaluates
July 12, 2005

San Francisco--At a dinner held here last night in conjunction with Semicon West, the Semiconductor Test Consortium celebrated the success it's achieved since its founding in 2003 while at the same time taking a realistic look at issues facing wider adoption of its OpenStar architecture.

STC chairman Bill Price, who represents member company Philips, told the audience that "open architecture is accepted and its here." At the STC's founding, he said, "a lot of people" (presumably competitors of OpenStar proponent Advantest) "were holding their breath waiting for us to go away, and that hasn't happened." Vendors with open-architecture offerings, he said, will be well positioned to profit from what he sees is a shift in revenue away from ATE platforms and toward instruments, software, and services.

John E. Bearden, who became an independent test consultant after retiring from IBM, sounded a few notes of caution based on surveys he has conducted of potential OpenStar customers. Major users now see open-architecture approaches as "nice to have, but not must have." Their concerns, he said, center on instrument-module availability and price. He also mentioned concerns of the third parties who are considering building OpenStar instruments--these companies, he said, would be more likely to participate if they had a good way to estimate demand.

Addressing that demand issue at least in part, Price noted that based on OpenStar systems already shipped, there are 8000 slots out there waiting for just the right instruments.

Posted by Rick Nelson on July 12, 2005 | Comments (0)