ATPG Tools Bring Physical Awareness To Bear

With greater complexity and smaller features, today’s chip designs are getting harder than ever to test. New failure mechanisms are constantly emerging that render traditional “stuck-at” testing helpless. IC manufacturers must use test techniques that detect timing, layout, and power-related defects. As a result, quality testing now requires the use of more fault models and time-consuming and error-prone importation of data from various design tools. Traditional ATPG tools are increasingly unable to meet modern requirements.

Representing a new generation of automatic test-pattern generation (ATPG) tools, Magma Design Automation’s Talus ATPG and Talus ATPGX are designed to concurrently target multiple fault models. Talus ATPG allows designers to improve test quality and turnaround time.

Talus ATPG is fully integrated into Magma’s Talus IC implementation system and leverages that platform’s unified data model architecture to efficiently access timing, layout, power, and other design data that is not available to other ATPG tools. This enables Talus ATPG to generate test patterns that other tools cannot. For example, Talus ATPG can generate tests for subtle bridge defects and crosstalk. Access to the unified data model also allows Talus ATPG to support virtually all current fault models and scale easily to support future models, and provides enhanced ease of use.

Talus ATPG includes additional capabilities that further reduce test time and test costs without reducing test quality. Magma touts it as the only multi-threaded ATPG tool available, enabling it to provide higher throughput than conventional tools. Talus ATPGX includes on-chip compression, offering forty-times less test-data volume. Talus ATPG also accurately diagnoses tester failures to find the logic and physical location of the defect. Diagnosis results can be passed on to Magma’s Knights Camelot and LogicMap products for correlation and failure analysis with the physical and electrical defects uploaded from the Magma YieldManager product.

Talus ATPG and Talus ATPGX are currently available. Please contact Magma for more product details.

Magma Design Automation