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Test Technology Newsletter
March -- April, 1997
The Newsletter of the Test Technology Technical Committee of the IEEE Computer Society
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6th NATW to bring test issues discussion to Rhode Island
The 6th IEEE North Atlantic Test Workshop will be held May 29 -
May 30, 1997 in West Greenwich, RI, USA. The workshop, which will focus on s20
Quality Designs and Tools for the 21st Century, provides a forum for discussion
of the latest issues relating to higher quality, more economical, and more
efficient testing methodologies and designs.
This year's workshop will open with a keynote talk by Don McInnis, CEO of
SpeedSim Inc. Don's talk will discuss Business Issues Facing Test and EDA
Tool Development and will provide an outlook on the future of CAD tools and the
challenges ahead. We are also pleased to announce the inclusion of an invited
paper on 0 Embedded DRAM Technologies and the test implications involved
which will be presented by a team of leading DRAM technologists from IBM
Microelectronics. The heart of the workshop, a day-and-a-half of technical
paper presentations, will include the following interesting topics: BIST, ATPG,
MCM testing, Fault Simulation, Testing Systems-on-a-Chip, Yield Prediction,
Delay Testing, Memory Testing, Circuit Simulation, and IDDQ2 test approaches.
The 1997 workshop will be held at the Whispering Pines Conference Center, located on the W. Alton Jones Campus of the University of Rhode Island. The campus is situated on 2,300 acres of pristine forest and include streams, ponds, a 75 acre lake, and a nineteenth-century farm. It adjoins the 40,000 acre Arcadia and Pachaug State Forests. The Conference Center is a 30-minute drive from Providence, RI, an hour-and-30 minute drive from Boston, MA or Hartford, CT, and a 3-hour drive from New York City.ar
For more information, contact:
Jim Monzel, Tel: (802)-769-6428, Fax: (802)-769-7509,
e-mail: jmonzel@vnet.ibm.com
WWW: http://www.ele.uri.edu/natw97
Article by J. Monzel, NATW '97 Chair
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System Test Standards Committee Meets in San Diego
Last November, the IEEE Standards Coordinating Committee 20 met in San
Diego, California, for the 2nd of two 1996 meetings. SCC20 gathers
semi-annually to work on several standards related to system test and
maintenance of electronic systems. While it is best known for the ATLAS
standard, SCC20 also sponsors approximately 20 other standards projects under
the management of six standards-writing subcommittees: 1. ATLAS which maintains
IEEE Std 716 and IEEE Std 771; 2. Test Equipment Description Language (TEDL)
which maintains IEEE Std 993; 3. Automatic Test Program Generation (ATPG) which
is developing the P1445 Digital Test Interchange Format (DTIF) standard; 4. A
Broad Based Environment for Test (ABBET) with nine active projects; 5.
Artificial Intelligence Exchange and Service Tie to All Test Environments
(AI-ESTATE) with three active projects; and 6. the Standard for the Management
of Test and Maintenance Information (TMIMS).
Throughout the meeting week, the six standards-writing subcommittees plus several administrative subcommittees met daily. Several significant events transpired during the meeting:
tx1800 x8280 § SCC20 held its annual election of officers. Lawrence Carpenter, ARINC, was re-elected as chair and Harry McGuckin, US Navy, and Michael Blair, GEC Feranti, were re-elected as vice chairs.
tx1800 x8280 § Several new participants attended meetings on ATLAS 2000, the next version of the ATLAS language. Progress on ATLAS 2000 included finalization of the language2s functional specification and discussion of a new language architecture document.
tx1800 x8280 § The SCC20 Steering Committee submitted a new PAR to re-establish a project to revise IEEE Std 771 (ATLAS User's Guide). The new PAR was necessary after the withdrawal of the old one at a September Standard's Board meeting, an action that was taken in spite of the fact that a revision of IEEE P771 was undergoing ballot.
tx1800 x8280 § The TEDL committee also suffered withdrawal of their PAR and standard. The revised TEDL standard has completed its balloting process and has passed its ballot as a full-use standard. The revised standard will be forwarded with a new PAR to the Standards Board for approval.
tx1800 x8280 § The ATPG subcommittee approved balloting of the current draft of the DTIF standard. The subcommittee continues to attempt to coordinate with the Computer Society's STIL (Standard Tester Interface Language) standards committee. In addition, the ATPG subcommittee is exploring approaches to standardize analog and mixed-signal test program generation.
tx1800 x8280 § The ABBET subcommittee is currently balloting full-use versions of P1226 (Overview and Architecture), P1226.3 (Resource Management), and P1226.4 (Instrument Drivers). The ballots for P1226 and P1226.4 have been delayed while prototyping and copyright issues are resolved. P1226.3 has completed two ballot circulations and is preparing for a third.
tx1800 x8280 § The AI-ESTATE subcommittee completed balloting on P1232.1 (Data and Knowledge Specification) and are now preparing P1232.2 (Service Specification) for ballot.
tx1800 x8280 § The TMIMS subcommittee, having completed their
requirements definition, are drafting the standard. They hope to ballot P1389
in the middle of 1997.
SCC20 is currently examining its scope, vision, and organization. Their goal
is to enable more effective and efficient development of test-related standards
for the IEEE. Through its Strategic Planning Working Group, SCC20 recognized
and endorsed its focus on developing system test standards. As a result, SCC20
will be known as the System Test Standards Committee rather than the ATLAS
Committee of old.
The next regularly scheduled meeting of SCC20 will be held in May in
Anchorage, Alaska. IEEE members and test professionals are invited to attend
and participate. Interested parties should contact the chair of the Meeting
Arrangements Subcommittee, Dr. William R. Simpson, at (703) 845-6637 or
rsimpson@ida.org.
Article by John W. Sheppard
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Nominate a Candidate for '98 TTTC Chair or Vice Chair
In accordance with the bylaws, TTTC will elect a Chair and two Vice-Chairs
for 1998. Nominations for candidates for these offices are made either by the
Nominations Committee or by petition from the members.
As a member, you have two choices if you wish to have someone nominated: 1.
you can propose a nominee to the Nominations Committee, who can either accept
or dismiss their proposal, or 2. you can nominate by petition. A properly
completed petition can't be turned down: it must be placed on the ballot.
To propose a nominee to the Nominations Committee, contact one of the
following committee members:
Fred Liguori, Tel: (908) 323-2842, e-mail: ffliguori@aol.com
Dan Graham, Tel: (609)424-6886x207, e-mail: dgraham170@aol.com
Ned Kornfield, Tel: (610) 499-4055, e-mail: ned613@aol.com
To nominate a candidate by petition, circulate a petition to TTTC members
with the name and short biography (career and TTTC history) of the person you
propose as a candidate. All nominees must be IEEE members. Petitions must be
signed by 10 or more TTTC members who are current IEEE members. Petition
signatures must be accompanied by valid IEEE member numbers. Send petition
nominations to Ed Thomas, TTTC Secretary, P.O. Box 629, Hollidaysburg,
PA 16648.
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CORRECTION: In the last issue, Associate Editor Mike Keller's
e-mail address was incorrectly given. Mike's correct e-mail address is:
mkeller@s1.drc.comar
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NEW COORDINATES
Changing Positions/Addresses
Ken Wagner is now Design Flow Manager at S3, Incorporated. Ken's new coordinates are: Kenneth D. Wagner, S3 Incorporated, 2801 Mission College Blvd, Santa Clara, CA 95052-0583 USA. Tel: (408) 588-8165, Fax: (408) 367-7320, E-mail: kwagner@s3.com r
Bozena Kaminska has accepted a position at OPMAXX. Her new
coordinates are: B. Kaminska, OPMAXX, 8209 SW Cirres Drive, Beaverton, OR 97008
USA. Tel: ain (503) 520-9200, Fax: (503) 520-16360 , E-mail: bozena@opmaxx.com
Mike Tien-Chien Lee has recently moved to a new company. His new
coordinates are: Mike T.-C. Lee, Avant! Corp, 1208 East Arques Ave., Sunnyvale,
CA 94086 USA. parTel:(408) 328-8672, E-mail: 2mikelee@avanticorp.com
M.R.Nayak has accepted the new position as Advisor, Enabling
Systems. His new coordinates are: M. R. Nayak, Enabling Systems, NIO, Dona
Paula, Goa-403 004 INDIA. Tel: +91 832 226253x347, Fax: +91 832 223340,
email: mrnayak@csnio.ren.nic.in
Bill Bruce has accepted a position in Motorola's imaging and storage division. Bill's new coordinates are: Bill Bruce, Motorola (OE38), 6501 Wm Cannon Dr West, Austin, TX USA. Tel: (512) 891-3121, Fax: fs20 (512) 891-6364, E-mail: rdwc@email.sps.mot.com
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Call For Papers: IEEE Design and Test of Computers Special Issue
on FPGA
IEEE Design and Test of Computers seeks original manuscripts for
a theme issue on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) scheduled to appear
in the Spring issue of 1998, Vol. 15, No. 1. Articles concerning applied
research and practical experience reports are solicited. Topics of interest
include, but are not limited to:
FPGA Fabrication and Technology. Manufacturing, process control, yield enhancement, and novel architectures for and device technology to support field programmable chips.
Exploitation of Field Programmability. Configurable computer architectures, rapid prototyping, programmable interconnect architectures, field-configurable memories, programmable I/O systems, and novel implementations.
Reliable On-line Implementations. On-line testing, built-in self-test, concurrent testing, design for rapid testability, latency reduction, fault containment, verification of reprogramming, on-line reconfiguration approaches, and design for reconfigurability.
Synthesis Approaches and Tools. Partitioning, logic minimization and
technology mapping, placement and routing, test generation, verification of
synthesis, and design for synthesizability.
Submitted articles must be original, i.e. not previously published or currently submitted for publication elsewhere. Submit articles by May 1, 1997 to: Prof. n Fabrizio Lombardi, Guest Editor, Department of Computer Science, Texas A&M University, College Station TX 77843-3112. Tel: (409) 845-5464, Fax: (409) 847-8578,
E-Mail: lombardi@cs.tamu.edu WWW site:
http://www.cs.tamu.edu/faculty/lombardi/datsi.htm
Follow submission and formating instructions given at the Computer Society D&T website: http://www.computer.org/pubs/d&t/d&t.htm n or in the
Spring 1996 issue of IEEE Design & Test magazine. Notification of
acceptance will be sent September 1, 1997. Camera-ready copy for accepted
papers will be due November 1, 1997.
Submitted by Fabrizio Lombardi
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Are your ATE computers about to bite you?
ATE and the Y2K Problem
If you or your company use or manufacture ATE, you should pay special
attention to this article and its references.
Here, in a nutshell, is the Y2K problem: most computer systems in use allow
for only two characters for the year date in their system software, as do most,
if not all, financial programs on the market today. Often this two-digit number
is used in math algorithms, etc.
So what happens when this number goes to 00 for the year 2000? Depending on how your computer and its application programs are designed, the least that can happen is you will get incorrect calculation results. The most drastic thing would be system failure, loss of data and possible financial ruin. In some computer programs, 99 can create a problem because it is recognized as an end-of-file character, aborting programs. In other computers incorrect algorithms have been used to recognize leap- years: the year 2000 is a leap-year, but the year 1900 was not.
So how does all this affect ATE makers and users? In many ways. Unless you
have checked every software driver, ATE application program, both home brewed
and COTS, and general software used by your ATE computers or those you have
shipped, you can not be sure that that they will not stop operating when they
start calculating dates in the 2nd millennium.
To fix this could cost you millions of dollars and manpower that you do not
have, you say? True, but the sooner you and your company realize the importance
of this problem and the sooner you start to develop a plan to address it, the
better off you will be.
Apparently Y2K is not just a software problem. IBM, Digital, and others have
discovered that they have older mainframes (such as the IBM S/370s)
that can not be fixed and have to be replaced (Information Week, 5 Feb2E
1996)!!
You say you are on top of the Y2K problem? Great! But what about other
departments in your company? What about the vendors and distributors you deal
with? Could a failure of a prime vendor seriously affect your organization?
The Y2K problem has the potential to become a serious financial problem.
Your company management needs to put serious effort into a solution before the
situation gets out of hand. The federal government has estimated that it will
cost billions of dollars to fix this problem at the federal level
alone. The issue has already been presented to Congress.
For a great outline of the Y2K problem and some solutions, see the January
1997 issue of Datamation Magazine and the following WWW sites:
www.mitre.org/research/y2k
www.tcse.org/year2000 http://it2000.com
The original version of this article was published in the ASTE
Newsletter, Jan. 1995, Volume 3.1. Michael E. Keller, Associate Editor
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EDITORIAL POLICY
This newsletter is the informal publication of the IEEE Computer Society
Test Technology Technical Committee. We will publish all appropriate material
although editing may be necessary to meet space or typographical constraints.
Articles are not refereed unless so noted. Opinions are not necessarily the
opinions or positions of TTTC.
Editor and Publisher: Ed Thomas
Associate Editor - Mike Keller
Associate Editor, D&T magazine - Don Lenhert
Associate Editor - Europe: Ian Dear
Associate Editor - Asia: Teruhiko Yamada
SEND CONTRIBUTIONS TO:
Ed Thomas, Editor, TTTC Office, PO Box 629, Hollidaysburg, PA 16648 USA. Tel: (814) 941-4669, Fax: (814) 941-4668.
E-mail: eddor@aol.com or tttcnews@aol.com
PREFERRED SUBMISSION FORMAT:
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