( ESNUG 445 Item 6 ) -------------------------------------------- [05/24/05]
Subject: ( ESNUG 443 #11 ) TetraMAX & FastScan Beat Cadence Encounter Test
> My experience with diagnosis using Fastscan and TetraMAX is that the
> tools are very basic and provide nearly identical capabilities. Little
> development activity has occurred on either tool in this area. Cadence
> recently rolled out Encounter Test. Cadence's tool seems to be a
> quantum leap above Mentor or Synopsys when it comes to diagnosis.
>
> - [ Chicken Man ]
From: Davide Appello <davide.appello=user company=st spot gone>
Hi John,
In ESNUG 443 #11, "Chicken Man" states in his experience TetraMAX
diagnostics are very basic and little development activity has occurred
in this area. For the past 3 years, I've led a team of people at ST
working on a project to use test and diagnostic results to improve yield.
Since TetraMAX is our primary tool for ATPG, we chose to use TetraMAX
for failure diagnostics as well. At the beginning of this project I
might agree that TetraMAX only provided basic diagnostics capabilities.
However, since then, we have seen significant improvements with TetraMAX,
in terms of diagnostic accuracy, features, and runtime. I think anyone
who has used TetraMAX diagnostics within the past 3 years would notice
at least some of these improvements. Maybe "Chicken Man" is still using
a very old version of TetraMAX?
- Davide Appello
STmicroelectronics Cornaredo, Italy
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
From: [ The Cheshire Cat ]
Hi, John,
Must be anon.
We also use Mentor's FastScan, DFT Insite, and DFT Advisor. Our chip sizes
range from 1 million to 20 Million gates, and some are at 90 nm.
Mentor's biggest strength in DFT is the ease of use of their products. For
example, a designer who hasn't used Mentor can start immediately using it
after only a day of training. To fully take advantage of all the features,
you can go through a 2 week training class. Again, you can start using the
products right away, but it probably takes 6 months to reach a certain
level of expertise.
For a 1 million gate design on a typical machine with 2 gigabytes of memory,
FastScan takes less than thirty minutes to generate the vectors. For a 20
million gate design, FastScan needs 4-16 gigabytes of memory. Depending on
the type of design, (e.g. if it uses pass gate multiplexers or tristate
busses), FastScan will take about a week to generate all the vectors.
Mentor's should continue to improve their capacity. They can also improve
the way they deal with path delay, as it is sometimes difficult to generate
vectors for path delay faults and the tool will not report properly why it
doesn't generate it.
FastScan is the workhorse of the Mentor tools. It always has 98-99%
overage. Vector size is smaller or comparable to other products. It can
handle complex design styles, such as different clocking schemes. I would
totally recommended Mentor's DFT to other engineers.
- [ The Cheshire Cat ]
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