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Summary form only given. The financial health of test equipment industry is much improved but excess competition remains a problem. Following the bursting of the 2000/01 technology bubble, test equipment vendors routinely lost money as they dealt with bloated cost structures and excess test capacity across the semi industry. 5 years later, much of the industry's excess test capacity is now being fully...
Only recently it has become pretty clear that back-end technologies can no longer be seen as an independent operation or as an after-thought. Specifically the "test" arena is changing dramatically from a pure good/bad decision maker towards a key information provider on the product e.g. on the manufacturing process. This enhanced test data contributes, or even drives, following yield and...
Traditionally, developers of multi-core chips have relied upon system-level techniques such as boundary scan and external instrumentation to access internal signals during silicon debug. The system-on-a-chip (SoC) nature of the cell processor makes it more difficult to rely on these techniques, as the system bus is internal to the chip, and only a limited number of pins are accessible. The cell development...
What types of debug capability can currently be found in cores? The first thing that comes to mind is scan. Though scan was originally implemented in order to get high fault coverage, it can also be used for debug. For instance, if there is an asynchronous switch from functional mode to scan mode, a functional test can be run, stopped and then the data in every scanned register can be shifted out...
While reuseable cores and SOC components are delivered along with a "complete" test suite to ensure good functional test coverage, this is inadequate for silicon debug
Summary form only given. There are three top players owning 75% of the semiconductor test market. Advantest has the majority of its revenues from DRAM memory test market, Teradyne and Agilent share the SOC and mixed signal markets. Credence is another key player in this space, particularly after their acquisition of NPTest in 2004. Agilent spun-off their ATE business in mid-2006, the new name for...
ATE suppliers have been confronted by cost-of-test issues for as long as this industry has been in existence. Some of VLSI Research's earliest projects involved cost of test in the late seventies and we have been asked to cover the topic from time to time by ATE suppliers as well as ATE users. Each time the cost-of-test issue has emerged as a major discussion point in ATE, the industry has made significant...
Summary form only given. The test industry has historically experienced quite a rollercoaster ride of fantastic growth and whiplash-inducing declines in response to semiconductor market cycles through the years. Even for the strongest of companies, such conditions present a tough environment in which to thrive. Yet the test industry is crucial to the success of semiconductor manufacturing and must...
Most interfaces on graphics and chipset devices are now high speed. High quality testing of well characterized interfaces up to the 3.2Gbps range has not required high speed/loopback channel cards or special external/internal instruments. The next frontier that is coming rapidly is the 6+Gbps range. The big question is "what is needed to maintain quality and low test cost at these speeds"?
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