ATPG cuts costs, reduces patterns by 50 per cent

16th January 2017

Synopsys Inc

Mick Elliott

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A substantial reduction in test generation time from more than a week to days has been achieved by Socionext using Synopsys’s TetraMAX II ATPG. It has also resulted in 50% fewer patterns, compared to the previous TetraMAX ATPG solution and is planned for usage on a 28-nanometer (nm) SoC design.

To meet the company's challenges of achieving high-quality manufacturing test goals with shorter design schedules for their SoC designs, Socionext ran TetraMAX II ATPG with minimal effort to adopt into their flow, and confirmed significantly improved results.

TetraMAX II ATPG delivered advanced, hardware-based, low-power test patterns within a few days compared to ten days required by the earlier-generation ATPG. Socionext is collaborating with Synopsys on TetraMAX II ATPG for upcoming SoC designs.

"Our rapid time-to-market and high-quality manufacturing test goals drove us to reassess our ATPG needs," said Taichiro Sasabe, general manager of the SoC design division at Socionext. "As part of our long-term collaboration with Synopsys, we evaluated TetraMAX II and were very pleased that TetraMAX II delivered up to 50% fewer test patterns while running 10 times faster than the prior generation TetraMAX ATPG. In addition, we were quickly able to set up TetraMAX II into our design flow because the tool is compatible with TetraMAX. We are confident TetraMAX II will meet our needs for faster, low-power test generation and higher test quality."

TetraMAX II ATPG is built on new engines that are extremely fast, memory efficient, and optimised for generating patterns and diagnosis of defect parts.

These innovations led to significantly fewer test patterns and cut runtime from days to hours.

TetraMAX II ATPG enables utilisation of all server cores regardless of design size, surpassing previous solutions.

The ability to reuse production-proven user and tool interfaces ensures designers can quickly deploy TetraMAX II ATPG risk-free on their most challenging designs. TetraMAX II ATPG utilises established links with Synopsys' Galaxy Design Platform tools, such as DFTMAX compression, PrimeTime timing analysis and StarRC extraction, as well as other Synopsys tools including Yield Explorer design-centric yield analysis, to deliver the highest quality test and the fastest, most productive flows.