ATEEDA Test Beta release
05-Apr-2006
Mixed Signal specialist announces EDA tool to allow testing of analogue circuits using Digital ATE equipment.
ATEEDA CEO, David Hamilton today announced the internal Beta release of a new EDA tool which promises to bring significant benefits to the rapidly growing market niche of mixed signal semiconductor manufacturing. Dr Hamilton commented:
"This is a very significant milestone for ATEEDA. ATEEDA Test is for use in-house in close collaboration with our customers. It will let us design test programs for our customers' existing and new mixed signal products. Specifically, it lets our customers test the analogue parts of the mixed signal devices much more easily at waferprobe. They already use Digital Automatic Test Equipment (ATE) at waferprobe. ATEEDA enables them to enhance their capability to test the analogue section at the same time. Typically the test time for even small analogue sections falls from the order of seconds to milliseconds using ATEEDA."
"This is a huge advantage and the opportunities for cost cutting and increasing test coverage in this area are very exciting. There is no other product which can deliver these benefits in spite of many engineers having tried to do so for a long time. In some devices, the projected manufacturing cost savings run into several $Ms and several $100Ks is common. One of the features of ATEEDA's approach that Test Managers find most attractive is the intuitive nature of how it works. Most engineers are already aware of step-testing and our time domain approach brings this right up to date. We simply introduce modern signal processing techniques to ensure the 'Step-like' signals we put in are so well matched to the circuits under test that any faults are immediately obvious."
"We have put a lot of effort into the user interface and ATEEDA can directly read in our customers' netlists and transistor models (e.g. HSpice). The test vectors can subsequently be deployed and run on their Digital testers with ease."