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Brady Benware, VP & GM Silicon Lifecycle Solutions, Mentor, A Siemens Business, delivered a keynote on “Silicon Lifecycle Challenges and the Expanding Role of Test”, at the ongoing ITC India 2020.
There is a new context for ICs. It is creating tremendous social benefit. The global smart cities market is expanding at a CAGR of 19 percent. It is expected to reach $189.5 billion in 2023. There will be challenges involved. Traditional challenges will continue, such as 5nm to 3nm change. There is system technology co-optimization (STCO) as well.
Worldwide fabless semiconductor company funding has been dominated by AI apps. The others are communications/high speed and 5G, silicon photonics, MEMS and sensors, etc. There is the Cerebras wafer scale engine for AI apps.
More of human experience and wellness depends today on electronics. We are getting to a situations where we no longer look at them as an inconvenience. Functional safety in IC designs is increasing. IC designs with functional safety has increased from 48 percent in 2016 to 59 percent in 2018. Security concerns are also increasing. Vulnerabilities also have serious financial ramifications, even when they are never exploited.
There are two test innovation vectors to meet full lifecycle requirements. There is greater complexity as more design-for-test occurs, and increasing lifecycle requirements as design for more-than-test happens. There are also growing challenges with static test bandwidth allocation. Programmable bandwidth eliminates the trade-off. Adapter nodes decouple core and top DFT requirements. It enables additional compression. More gates and pins drive the new test access requirements.
High bandwidth scan test can be done for leveraging high speed IOs (SERDES). Comprehensive safety subsystems are also available. You can detect and respond to degradations. Advanced automotive features require faster testing. More efficient LBIST is needed for lifecycle management.
Security and optimization challenges require more than structural monitoring. There are functional monitoring areas as well, such as hardware or software bugs, malicious attacks, use-case and workload surprises.
Siemens has acquired UltraSOC, to be part of Mentor’s Tessent product family, for silicon lifecycle management. Embedded analytics is a separate subsystem today. There are non-intrusive, hardware-based analytics, and provide broad visibility to analyze software and system, everywhere in the SoC. You can design for function, and augment for deployment. There is lifecycle resilience and optimization.
The test community is the right community to tackle the lifecycle challenges. It can innovate within the expanded role. You need pass/fail and insightful data, structural risks and functional risks, and standalone and statistical. There are exciting times ahead with the expanding role of test.
VP & GM Silicon Lifecycle Solutions, Mentor, A Siemens Business.