Whatever happened to analog BIST?
I just got a call from a test-industry veteran who is now working as a consultant and who asked for my thoughts on the current state of analog BIST. He cited relatively optimistic articles I wrote earlier this decade, including "DFT puzzle comes together," in which I wrote, "Analog BIST functions will ultimately become invaluable additions to design and test engineers’ toolboxes, but as yet, analog pieces don’t mesh seamlessly with IC design flows, as do the digital pieces."
Woops! Well, analog is getting support from EDA companies, as I report in "Handcrafted analog gets automated assist" and "Simulation gets speed, capacity boost." But that certainly hasn’t led to a proliferation of analog BIST.
What happened? Well, firms like Opmaxx (which won a Test & Measurement World Best in Test award in 1998 for its Analog Design and Test Automation Tool Suite) and LogicVision (which offered data-converter and PLL BIST) have gone through one or more levels of acquisition, with their productized versions of analog BIST falling by the wayside. As more and more functions are performed in the digital domain, there seems to be little opportunity to successfully market analog BIST IP. Chip designers that might want to employ analog BIST can implement it on an ad hoc basis. And power-management issues can make any type BIST unattractive for mobile applications.
Also, the semiconductor ATE industry has undergone a transformation, and analog instruments and the mainframes needed to support them are less expensive now, making analog BIST less important in controlling the cost of test.
There are exceptions, and BIST is making inroads as a tool for high-speed serial I/O tests, with Synopsys and Vitesse Semiconductor offering analog BIST tools. See my colleague Ron Wilson’s article "As SOCs grow, test-and-measurement instruments move on-chip" and scroll down to "The analog domain" subhead for more.
What do you think? Is there a need for analog BIST that vendors aren’t addressing?
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