Magma ATPG products expand DFT capabilities

Magma Design Automation has unveiled Talus ATPG and Talus ATPG-X with on-chip compression. These advanced automatic test pattern generation (ATPG) products enable designers to significantly improve test quality, reduce turnaround time and cut costs of nanometer ICs. By integrating Talus ATPG and Talus ATPG-X into the Talus physical design environment, Magma offers the only IC implementation flow that provides true Physically Aware DFT.

The increased complexity and smaller feature sizes of today's chip designs make it more complicated to test manufactured ICs. New failure mechanisms are constantly emerging. Traditionally, most defects could be detected using stuck-at patterns generated by the ATPG tool using just a simple gate-level representation of the design. To maintain required defect per million (DPM) rates today, 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 have neither the performance nor the capacity to deliver the required level of test quality and turnaround time for nanometer ICs.

Designed to concurrently target multiple fault models, Talus ATPG allows designers to improve test quality and turnaround time. It is fully integrated into Magma's Talus IC implementation system and leverages the 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 provide enhanced ease of use.

Talus ATPG includes additional capabilities that further reduce test time and test costs without reducing test quality. It is the only multi-threaded ATPG tool available, enabling it to provide higher throughput than conventional tools. Talus ATPG-X includes on-chip compression, offering a 40X reduction in test data volume. Talus ATPG also accurately diagnoses tester failures to find the logic and physical location of the defect. Diagnostic 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 Knights YieldManager product.

"With the increasing cost to design and manufacture ICs, it is critical to make test process more efficient if you can't test it, don't build it," said Kam Kittrell, general manager of Magma's Design Implementation Business Unit. "The addition of Talus ATPG strengthens the Talus platform's test capabilities, allowing our customers to have higher confidence in their ability to build and test from their IC designs."