( SNUG 02 Item 9 ) --------------------------------------------- [ 5/15/02 ]
Subject: Synopsys TetraMAX & Mentor FastScan
WHERE THERE'S SMOKE: Something's up with TetraMAX. Last year, 4 users
listed it as Synopsys' worst tool. This year, 10 did. I'm also seeing a
50/50 split of user letters liking TetraMAX and its rival FastScan.
Dataquest FY 2000 ATPG Market (in $ Millions)
Synopsys ############### $15.1 (52%)
Mentor ########### $11.3 (39%)
SynTest ## $1.5 (5%)
Fluence # $0.9 (3%)
Last year, Mentor had a 24% marketshare and Gary Smith of Dataquest had
even said in the SNUG'01 Trip Report that "Mentor's marketshare should
continue to shrink." Something's going on with TertraMAX *and* FastScan.
Ironically, Synopsys owns 51% and Mentor only owns 20% of the market of all
the test tools that aren't ATPG (like scan insertion, BIST, BSD Compiler,
etc.) Maybe that's what Gary was talking about last year...
"Mentor has put more emphasis into DFT development than Synopsys has
over the past year and the numbers show it."
- Laurie Balch of Dataquest
"We bought TetraMax, again because of the 'minimize vendors' philosophy,
but I think we might have had a little easier time with FastScan. We
used LogicVision for Memory BIST and JTAG."
- Curt Beckmann of Rhapsody Networks
"We use TetraMAX here. We have had actual silicon results here with
success. The TetraMAX solution requires no further library model
support. (We can use the Synopsys libraries already provided for
synthesis.) TetraMAX has also been a natural migration from the old
Test Compiler. Other groups are using FastScan. Our group here has
no experience with this tool, however."
- an anon engineer
"I prefer FastScan. It takes longer to figure out, but it's alot
more flexible. Also supports custom tap controllers and scan
chain reordering."
- David Bishop of Kodak
"TetraMax. We like one stop shoping."
- Brent Lawson of Texas Instruments
"We use FastScan and I like the tool. The DeBussy GUI helps a lot to
debug some of the DFT issues fast."
- Karl Kaiser of Resonext
"I'm agnostic. But my customers are using Mentor Fastscan."
- Tom Moxon of Moxon Design
"I have tried a few different ATPG tools over the years and TetraMax is
the easiest one I have ever used. It has good on-line help manuals
and decent debugging features. It also generates ATPG vectors very
fast. A feature I would love to see would be the ability to mask out
specific flops in specific vectors in the generated WGL file using the
command line instead of post-processing scripts."
- an anon engineer
"The TetraMAX product was not presented in a very good light at SNUG.
They indicated a full design of several million gates was run through
TetraMAX and it checked 3 critical paths. Only 3 paths in a million
gate design? They indicated the tool has since been improved and does
a much better job, but did not give statistics. If this is their idea
of test coverage, then Synopsys needs to rethink the ATPG area."
- Pallab Chatterjee of SiliconMap
"We prefer FastScan."
- Scott Campbell of Motorola
"We use Mentor Fastscan, but I am not sure why we have not looked
at Tetramax."
- an anon engineer
"We are using FastScan since its more user friendly, so we save time."
- Gideon Paul of TeraChip
"We use DCXP + Tetramax. Never looked at Mentor."
- an anon engineer
"We chose Mentor's FastScan and MemBist architect as it simplified the
DFT 'effort' for us, given that Synopsys did not have an offering for
memory BIST. Our FastScan vs. TetraMax study did not reveal any
compellingreasons to go either way, however."
- Neel Das of Corrent Corp.
"Tetramax is a great tool! I was one of the first users. The GUI is
much better than FastScan's and allows me to debug issues very quickly.
For example, I've tried to use the FastScan GUI to debug why a fault
was not detected and FastScan just hung. TetraMAX shows the
appropriate data immediately. Support is very good. I've been doing
some benchmarking between FastScan and TetraMAX lately, and TetraMAX
is much faster. It didn't help my opinion of Mentor when I went to
training and for any moderately difficult question I asked the trainer,
he answered 'well, just use TetraMax.'
BSD Compiler: Why would anyone use this thing? If you are doing memory
BIST with Logicvision, their flow works very well. Some of my
colleagues argue that the ability to do compliance checking with BSD
Compiler is valuable, but LogicVision generates a testbench that
simulates very quickly.
ILM models: Synopsys really plugged these during SNUG. I have two
thoughts on ILM models:
1.) I hope they are more robust than Stamp models, QTM and
any other model Synopsys has tried in the last few years.
2.) It would be great if they work for scan insertion. Not
because of capacity, runtime etc. but because it would be
a way to finally have DC stitch without changing anything
inside a block.
I don't know how many times I've don't touched a block that had scan
stitched, only to have DC mess with it. All I wanted is to hook up
its scan chains at another level."
- an anon engineer
"TetraMax and Fastscan have similar performance. For me, both tools
can be interchangeable."
- Hui Fu of Infineon
"Thank God for ASIC vendors who take care of scan and JTAG insertion.
I don't want to go there."
- Kevin Hubbard of Siemens
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