Pre and Post-Silicon Verification Have Never Been Closer! Leveraging Portable Stimulus for Automatic Test Equipment (ATE)

By _Cadence Blog

May 8, 2023

The initial focus of the Portable Test and Stimulus Standard (PSS) was pre-silicon verification – even if the community, from the beginning, envisioned re-using pre-silicon test content in post-silicon. In this blog post, we will cover new use cases with PSS toward ATE: i.e., Automated Test Equipment typically used in production tests.

The Challenge

The ever-increasing design complexity of technology nodes and new packaging technologies for digital devices has led to a new class of device failures and, consequently, new testing approaches and innovative thinking to overcome the time-to-market pressure of today. These new demands are observed in all value chain steps and push the once silo-based disciplines, such as pre-silicon verification and ATE, to work together.

On the ATE side, the typical production test content is currently dominated by structural tests. However, while the structural test is the foundation for systematic test coverage according to targeted fault models, there is a growing need for functional tests to reach high volume readiness. Accordingly, there is a trend for an increasing amount of functional tests – further amplified by the rising quality expectations in diverse applications (e.g., automotive, data center, high-margin consumer products).

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