The First Automotive Design ASIC Platform

The First Automotive Design ASIC Platform
by Daniel Nenni on 12-11-2023 at 8:00 am

Alchip Automotive ASIC Design Platform

Alchip Technologies, Ltd. is a company that specializes in ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit) design and manufacturing. They are known for providing high-performance and customized ASIC solutions for a variety of applications. Alchip works with clients to design and develop integrated circuits that meet specific… Read More


Tessent SSN Enables Significant Test Time Savings for SoC ATPG

Tessent SSN Enables Significant Test Time Savings for SoC ATPG
by Kalar Rajendiran on 05-08-2023 at 6:00 am

Pattern Generation Block Level ATPG Flow

SoC test challenges arise due to the complexity and diversity of the functional blocks integrated into the chip. As SoCs become more complex, it becomes increasingly difficult to access all of the functional blocks within the chip for testing. SoCs also can contain billions of transistors, making it extremely time-consuming… Read More


Getting Physical to Improve Test – White Paper

Getting Physical to Improve Test – White Paper
by Tom Simon on 08-26-2020 at 6:00 am

Calculating Total Critical Area

One of the most significant and oft repeated trends in EDA is the use of information from layout to help drive other parts of the design flow. This has happened with simulation and synthesis among other things. Of course, we think of test as a physical operation, but test pattern generation and sorting have been netlist based operations.… Read More


Bringing Hierarchy to DFT

Bringing Hierarchy to DFT
by Tom Simon on 01-30-2020 at 6:00 am

Tessent Hierarchical Flow

Hierarchy is nearly universally used in the SoC design process to help manage complexity. Dealing with flat logical or physical designs proved unworkable decades ago. However, there were a few places in the flow where flat tools continued to be used. Mentor lead the pack in the years around 1999 in helping the industry move from … Read More


ITC shines light on new Mentor Test announcements

ITC shines light on new Mentor Test announcements
by Tom Simon on 11-18-2019 at 10:00 am

The 50th International Test Conference was just held in Washington DC, where papers, sessions, workshops and announcements addressing the increasing complexity and expanding use of semiconductors showed that innovations in test are crucial to design and product success. Test methodologies and even the scope of test have … Read More


Automotive Market Pushing Test Tool Capabilities

Automotive Market Pushing Test Tool Capabilities
by Tom Simon on 07-09-2019 at 8:00 am

It’s easy to imagine that the main impetus for automotive electronics safety standards like ISO 26262 is the emergence of autonomous driving technology. However, even cars that do not offer this capability rely heavily on electronics for many critical systems. These include engine control, braking, crash sensors, and stability… Read More


Hierarchical RTL Based ATPG for an ARM A75 Based SOC

Hierarchical RTL Based ATPG for an ARM A75 Based SOC
by Tom Simon on 03-27-2019 at 5:00 am

Two central concepts have led to the growth of our ability to manage and implement larger and larger designs: hierarchy and higher levels of abstraction. Without these two approaches the enormous designs we are seeing in SOCs would not be possible. Hierarchy in particular allows the reuse of component blocks, such as CPU cores.… Read More


How to be Smart About DFT for AI Chips

How to be Smart About DFT for AI Chips
by Tom Simon on 01-31-2019 at 12:00 pm

We have entered the age of AI specific processors, where specialized silicon is being produced to tackle the compute needs of AI. Whether they use GPUs, embedded programmable logic or specialized CPUs, many AI chips are based on parallel processing. This makes sense because of the parallel nature of AI computing. As a result, in… Read More


The Pain of Test Pattern Bring-up for First Silicon Debug

The Pain of Test Pattern Bring-up for First Silicon Debug
by Daniel Payne on 08-22-2018 at 7:00 am

In the semiconductor world we have divided our engineering talent up into many adjacent disciplines and each comes with their own job titles: Design engineers, Verification engineers, DFT engineers, Test engineers. When first silicon becomes available then everyone on the team, and especially management all have a few big … Read More


Test Compression for Mission Critical SoCs

Test Compression for Mission Critical SoCs
by Mitch Heins on 12-20-2017 at 12:00 pm

With the advent of the Internet-of-Things (IoT), Industry 4.0, Cognitive Computing, and autonomous vehicles and robots we are seeing an unprecedented number of systems-on-a-chip (SoCs) going into mission-critical applications. To accomplish the complexity of these applications, SoCs are being manufactured in leading-edge… Read More