Rick Nelson

Asset, Verigy go holiday shopping
December 6, 2007

This seems to be acquisition week in the test industry. Verigy, the semiconductor ATE spin-off of Agilent Technologies, agreed to acquire Inovys, a maker of test software and low-cost ATE systems. In addition, Asset-InterTech, the boundary-scan vendor, acquired International Test Technologies, which makes a microprocessor emulation platform.

The Asset acquisition of ITT makes a lot of sense. Asset’s ScanWorks boundary-scan software and ITT’s processor emulation platform nicely complement each other. ITT’s emulation can handle test chores not amenable to boundary-scan test. As Asset president and CEO Glenn Woppman notes in a press release announcing the acquisition, “With our integrated product platform, we’ve been able to offer users more test coverage than they could achieve with either ScanWorks or ITT’s μMaster on its own.” He also alludes to his firm’s efforts on embedded instrumentation: “In a certain sense, ITT’s processor-based emulation functionality is another type of embedded instrumentation technology.” In addition, the two firms have been working together for several years.

The Verigy move is a little bit more difficult to figure out. The press release announcing the Inovys deal focuses on the Inovys products that “bridge the gap between electronic design automation (EDA) and test, providing a path between design and production” in an effort to address time to yield.

It will be interesting to see what happens to Inovys’s Ocelot hardware platforms, and it will be interesting to see whether Inovys’ software tools will remain vendor-neutral or become V93000-specific. We will keep you posted.

Update (December 13): As was the case in Asset's acquisition of ITT, the Verigy acquisition of Inovys grew out of an ongoing cooperative effort. Read related post here.

Posted by Rick Nelson on December 6, 2007 | Comments (0)