Last week, ASSET was in attendance at the International Test Conference (ITC) in Austin, TX. ITC is the cornerstone of “Test Week”, a premiere technical event which addresses the challenges of providing high-quality, cost-effective test solutions for chips, boards and systems. ASSET had one of the largest booths at the Exhibition and we also contributed to tutorials, advanced industrial practice sessions, poster sessions, workshops, and a host of professional fringe meetings.
ASSET's green-shirted team were in great demand!
ITC is renowned for gathering researchers and industry experts together to address today’s and tomorrow’s test challenges. ASSET took the opportunity to unveil the first toolkit for the IJTAG (IEEE 1687) standard. This specification, which is expected to be ratified in the second half of 2011, defines an access architecture and protocol for instruments that are embedded into semiconductor chips. As such, it provides for the means by which these embedded instruments can be managed, accessed and automated, and their output analyzed. This will allow for portability and reuse of on-chip built-in self test (BIST), monitors and other instrumentation across the entire product life cycle/value chain, from chips to boards to systems. And standardizing of these access and control mechanisms will allow for a new universe of low-cost, high-power capabilities for design validation and test engineers. At the Exhibition, ASSET demonstrated the use of IJTAG for chip/stack/board Memory BIST.
Demo of the world's first toolkit for IJTAG, running on the ScanWorks® Platform
And customers are using this new technology ahead of its formal ratification. We also put out a press release about our partnership with Flextronics, to accelerate the adoption of the IJTAG standard. You can read about the new ScanWorks IJTAG software and its users on our news page at www.asset-intertech.com/press_room.html.
Among our other activities during Test Week were:
- Presented the “Bridge to Moore” full day tutorial on IEEE standards 1149.1, 1500, 1149.7 and P1687.
- Presented 1149.7 and P1687 posters during the Tuesday “Texas Beer Blast”.
- Chaired a Technical Session on IC soft-error tolerance and multicore testing.
- Chaired the IEEE Workshop on Defect- and Data-driven Testing (D3T).
- Showcased a poster on “1149.3D?!” at the 3D-TEST Workshop.
- Attended various fringe and technical meetings such as the iNEMI BIST, iNEMI External Memory Test, and IEEE standards.
ITC and Test Week are excellent forums for engineers to exchange ideas on test and to learn about emerging technologies and standards. Next year’s Test Week will be the week of September 18 – 23, 2011 at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim, CA. Check it out at www.itctestweek.org and pencil it in your calendars if you can make it – it would be good to see you there.
