protocol aware for next tester

kimo2

Started by Austin Holloway, an AE at Teradyne, exclaiming,

“In my opinion, this is just the biggest thing to hit ATE ever. Anyone else feel the same?”

My curiosity piqued, I started googling, and found that there were 3-4 papers, and a panel discussion on the topic at ITC 2007.  The idea was apparently broached originally by Andrew Evans, a test engineer at Broadcom, in a call to the ATE industry to start thinking about producing  testers to operate at a higher level of abstraction, to pull test engineers out of the low-level bit/edge pushing that they seemed to have been trapped in since the beginning of time.  Been there, done that, hate it, I agree!
Anyway, to try and push this idea into a small enough nutshell to fit in a blog post, protocol-aware testers would be able to 1) operate on higher level commands for protocol-based interfaces such as JTAG, I2C, or SPI in the simpler cases, and PCIe or DDR in the more challenging cases, and 2) be able to handshake with the DUT.  Imagine that.
Sounds like a dream - but not all believe it can bring reduced development time or improved quality.  As Steve Sunter of LogicVision points out, the lower level protocols are already sufficiently automated (and the time-to-market advantage would be minimal), and for DSM designs, the incremental quality (over structural test) gained from implementing the higher-level protocols would be dubious at best.

jimcmwang

Thanks!!!!!!!!!

jimcmwang

protocol-aware ate