At ITC, Mentor to demonstrate Tessent MissionMode automotive IC in-system test

Mentor, a Siemens business, today announced the availability of its new Tessent MissionMode product, which combines automation and on-chip IP to test and diagnose automotive semiconductors at any point during a vehicle’s functional operation. The company will demonstrate the product next week at the International Test Conference in Fort Worth, TX.

Stephen Pateras, product marketing director for Tessent BIST and automotive at Mentor, said the market for automotive ICs is perhaps the fastest growing segment in the semiconductor industry. And whereas traditionally, automotive semiconductors have been produced with mature, previous-generation processes, that’s no longer the case as the industry strives to meet the performance demands of ADAS systems and autonomous vehicles. Achieving the necessary teraFLOPS of compute power requires very advanced nodes.

“We face a perfect storm of large, complex designs, small windows, and high reliability requirements,” Pateras said in a phone interview yesterday. “DFT and test are right at the center of dealing with the required complexity, quality, and reliability—and delivering in a cost-effective way.”

A key approach, he said, is to implement a methodology for continuous or periodic monitoring a car while it’s operating. Tessent MissionMode, he added, integrates the infrastructure for system-software-based access to any test and diagnosis capabilities integrated within an automotive chip.

That infrastructure includes an in-system test (IST) controller that drives an internal IEEE 1687 (IJTAG) access network to communicate to any IJTAG-compliant IP. In particular, the IST controller fully supports all Tessent design-for-test products including memory BIST, logic BIST, and EDT logic. The IST controller also provides a communication path to outside the chip through a generic CPU interface. This interface can be adapted to work with any CPU bus protocol typically used in automotive systems—such as Ethernet, CAN, or I²C. The controller also supports direct memory access to test instructions stored in an optional on-chip ROM.

The on-chip infrastructure is highly programmable, allowing any number of different test sequences to be applied as needed, Pateras said. The Tessent MissionMode tool automates the integration and full verification of this infrastructure, and it automates the generation of all CPU instructions necessary to run any tests and extract any diagnostic results.

He added that Tessent MissionMode supports the RTL generation, integration, and verification of any number of IST controllers as well as automated translation between IJTAG serial data and parallel CPU read/write commands. Tessent MissionMode also supports integration of third-party IJTAG-compliant instruments into the IJTAG network.

Like all Tessent products, Tessent MissionMode is delivered with an ISO 26262 software tool qualification report that can be used to simplify a customer’s ASIL device certification process. All Tessent software tool qualification reports are certified by SGS-TüV Saar.

To register for a demonstration of Tessent MissionMode other Mentor automotive test technologies at ITC, visit http://bit.ly/2y0WXN0.