( DAC 00 Item 27 ) --------------------------------------------- [ 7/13/00 ]
Subject: Scan/ATPG from Synopsys, ATG, Syntest, Fluence/TSSI, Opmaxx
HAPPY SYNOPSYS: Leveraging of their synthesis monopoly a few years back,
Synopsys managed to grab a serious chunk of the ATPG market with a their
super-crappy Test Compiler product. It was my first lesson in the old adage
that there's no such thing as bad PR. ESNUG was drowning in customer
complaints about Test Compiler for the first 9 months months it came out!
Drowning! At one point I simply put a 6 month moratorium on Test Compiler
issues in ESNUG to give *everyone* a rest. Yet it sold like hotcakes.
Eventually (as in after about 2 years) Synopsys finally got Test Compiler to
be passably bugless for the majority of customers. The funny thing is all
during that time, Mentor had a technologicly superior tool, Fastscan, but
they tended to sell it (or should I say "rent" it) in conjunction with their
consulting business. The other thing is that they simply never marketed it
all that well. Into this void temporarily Sunrise Test appeared. Viewlogic
bought them, and then eventually, Synopsys got (and killed) Sunrise when it
borg-ed ViewLogic. "You will be assimilated to the Synopsys collective."
Mentor slowly woke up to the fact that they had a better tool, but it was
too late -- Synopsys already bouyed up Test Compiler and then introduced
their kickass TetraMax tool. Since then, they've dominated.
"Synopsys continues their dominance of the scan insertion and ATPG market
with their Tetramax tool, in part because they bought their competitor
Sunrise and killed it.
ATG Technologies Inc., which claimed to do better sequential ATPG than
Tetramax, is out of business.
Syntest says their ATPG software is better than Tetramax at partial scan
and sequential ATPG, as well as better test compaction. Synopys has
dominated the test market, so now Cadence is teaming with Syntest to
allow Ambit to do one pass synthesis. I wouldn't be surprised if
Cadence buys these guys. They said their tool works very well with
multiple clock domains.
Fluence used to be TSSI. Their software is used to translate tester
-independent formats (like WGL or STIL) into the vendor-specific formats
that the testers use. Fluence also sells a set of digital scan
insertion, fault grade, IDDQ and ATPG tools. They have either bought or
teamed with Opmaxx. Opmaxx tools are for creating analog and mixed
signal tests. They do a variety of simulations to predict the range of
parameters your analog circuit should display if it was manufactured
within tolerances, grade your existing analog tests to see how many
faults they detect, and generate more analog tests if needed. Fluence
also has a BIST tool for voltage controlled oscillators that measures
jitter.
Simutest is a competitor of Fluence for creating vendor-specific test
programs.
Interesting note on testers: LTX did not have a booth at DAC, and didn't
have one at the last International Test Conference, either. It sounded
like they may be headed out of business. The Simutest salesman told me
that TI has used Teradyne testers for 15 years, but has recently dumped
them in favor of LTX - things may be turning around."
- an anon engineer
"TetraMAX is good, but as a colleague at a really big company said, if
Mentor's FastScan is working okay for you, and you've already gone
through the QA process for it, you're not going to switch to Synopsys.
But TetraMAX could certainly grab seats at new sites and the development
team is world class. You didn't mention IBM TestBench, John. Mostly
used by IBM customers, but it is probably the most powerful of all the
ATPG tools on the market, with almost every possible known test idea
as an option."
- Prof. Hank Walker of Texas A&M University
"Not much new in DFT Tools from Synopsys or Mentor except for a company
called Fluence who had a product called TDX. It claimed to generate an
overall fault coverage number using the scan vectors from ATPG Tools
like TetraMAX, BIST vectors and functional vectors running them against
a full timing fault simulator. They also claimed 64 bit support which
will handle our really large circuits.
Fluence also had some really unique BIST for testing jitter and numerous
AD and DA converters. They seem to be worth looking into."
- a fake "anonymous" customer reply sent by Fluence marketing
from an aol.com account to the ESNUG DAC survey. (When you read
over 100 user responses, you learn to easily pick out the fakes.)
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