The new software introduces high-bandwidth internal JTAG (IJTAG) and generic data streaming functionality to help customers reduce costs and testing time by accelerating data through the wide bus of Siemens' Tessent Streaming Scan Network (SSN) software.
The semiconductor industry is facing unprecedented and accelerating evolution as transistor density expands in multiple dimensions. As semiconductor designs advance from 2D to 2.5D and fully 3D IC architectures, the challenges of design testing have multiplied exponentially. The increasing number of test patterns, longer pattern application times, high costs of automated test equipment (ATE), and the limited number of accessible test pins mean that optimizing existing infrastructure for test scaling is not only crucial but essential to maintaining a competitive edge in the design process.
“In today’s complex integrated circuit designs, optimizing test time is a major challenge. By leveraging Siemens’ SSN architecture to transform traditional serial IJTAG operations into high-bandwidth parallel processes, Tessent IJTAG Pro not only accelerates testing and reduces associated costs, but also provides the flexibility needed to revolutionize access to testing and meet the evolving needs of the industry,” said Ankur Gupta, senior vice president and general manager of DDCP, Siemens Digital Industries Software. “As semiconductor design evolves from simple 2D integrated circuit architectures to full 3D architectures, the cost savings in testing will apply to each chiplet as well as the entire 3D integrated circuit package.”.
"High-bandwidth IJTAG innovatively leverages the SSN bus architecture and delivers much faster patterns than traditional serial methods, leading to a substantial reduction in test application time, especially for BIST and mixed-signal IP testing," said Srinivas Vooka, senior director of engineering at Google.
The combination of IJTAG Pro's features along with Siemens' recent announcement of Tessent™ AnalogTest software represents a significant expansion of capabilities and bandwidth.
