编辑笔记：刚刚结束的ITC展示了一种趋势——测试测量仪器正在走下工作台并被整合到芯片里。事实上这种趋势已经在在之前的一些测试产品中得到印证，如安捷伦和泰克推出的FPGA调试解决方案。在使用这种解决方案的时候，需要将JTAGIP核下载到FPGA中控制各种信号输入，同时输出信号传送到MSO或者逻辑分析仪上，并通过与相应的软件分析相结合从而达到调试FPGA内部电路的目的。Instruments are moving off your bench and into your chips. That’s the message one might have taken away from an International Test Conference address titled “The need for Standard and Efficient Interconnection and Access of Embedded Everything” by Inovys chief scientist Al Crouch. He’s been poking around in other people’s chips, he said, and he’s found a variety of embedded instruments based on technologies from companies including DAFCA, Cisco, ARM, and ASE.
Such instruments are necessary, he said, to help silicon makers
keep up with Moore’s law and to serve in applications ranging from
debug to yield enhancement to system-level troubleshooting. Dense
chips and stacked-die multichip packages, he said, require
significant debug infrastructure to get them up and running. As for
system-level test, he said that a chip might work fine when it’s
plugged into a $10,000 load board connected to a $2 million ATE
system. But when you pack it onto a 5x5-in. board with ten other
chips and connect it to a $35 power supply, it might turn out not
to work so well. Embedded instruments, he said, can provide the
only way of finding out exactly what’s going on while avoiding
no-trouble-found round trips to a tester.
But the proliferation of embedded instruments, he said, presents
its own problems involving the need to communicate with them
effectively. He added that second-order effects—embedded
instruments within embedded instruments—further complicate matters.
Today’s efforts to communicate with embedded instruments are mainly
ad hoc, he said, with debug, yield, and system-troubleshooting
personnel pursuing their own agendas without regard to what others
are doing. He concluded that the IEEE P1687 internal JTAG
initiative can provide an effective way for orderly, standardized
embedded-instrument communication and control.
He concluded by saying that chip designers can’t really design just
for the chip itself today—they must design for the wafer-level and
end-system environment as well, as embedded content continues to
grow.
In related ITC news, Asset InterTech announced that it has expanded its embedded-instrument support.
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