Fort Worth, TX. Alliance ATE Consulting Group Inc. announced Wednesday that Inphi has signed a multiyear Velocity CAE tool licensing agreement, continuing Inphi’s design-to-test partnership with Alliance ATE. Alliance ATE Consulting Group representatives were on hand at the International Test Conference held here this week to tout the Inphi announcement and to outline the company’s design-to-test approach.
In an exhibit-hall presentation, Alliance ATE’s Jeff Platt explained that the Velocity CAE software provides semiconductor manufacturers with an automated process for translating WGL, STIL, and EVCD simulation vectors to a targeted test platform in a single pass with minimal user intervention. From a test perspective, Platt said, “What we see is a big problem in communication from design to test and back.” Velocity CAE’s automated approach to design to test and test to design speeds time to market, he said.
He added that the process does not require a test engineer plus a design engineer. “Anyone in the process can use it,” he said. “The expertise is built into the tool. The base knowledge you need is, what file format are you coming from, and what test platform are you going to.”
He described several features of the tool, including “playback,” which lets you investigate issues related to jitter, asynchronous behavior, or missing clock signals, for example. An optimized playback function can be selected with a GUI checkbox.
Ramanan Thiagarajah, vice president of operations engineering and global supply chain at Inphi, said in a press release, “The intuitive Velocity Tools have simplified our test program development requirements and reduced our test development time by approximately 25%, which has greatly reduced our overall time to market.”
“We have been working with Inphi for more than a decade, and we value their commitment to Alliance’s Velocity CAE Software,” added Bill Wymbs, CEO of Alliance ATE. “Velocity’s intelligent algorithms allow Inphi to apply automated techniques across both their Networking and DSP product lines.”
