Saturday, November 26, 2011

Asian Test Symposium 2011: Part II

We reached the venue called Hotel Crowne Plaza in Okhla. The place looked a bit odd. Okhla is an industrial area and polluted. You get the smell of industries as soon as you enter Okhla. I wish it was a hotel somewhere near Connaught Place in New Delhi. Perhaps those places were too expensive f or the organizers. I was not too impressed with Crowne Plaza and Okhla.

I met Janusz Rajski at the registration desk. He is Chief Scientist and Director of Engineering at Mentor's ATPG and EDT division. I work with Synopsys which is a competitor of Mentor. But I must confess that I'm a great fan of Janusz because of his singular contribution to Test. Pramod and I introduced ourselves to Janusz. I told him that I met him last time during ITC 2008 when Rohit (my manager Rohit Kapur) introduced me to him. Janusz exactly remembered the place where we met in ITC 2008. He told me that it was during the poster-session of ITC 2008 when Rohit introduced me! I was completely taken aback by his strong memory.

Inside the conference hall, I met many of my old friends from Cadence there. Exchanged pleasantries with all of them.

The Organizing Committee co-Chairs Prof Patra from IITKgp started ATS with his welcome note. It was followed by two keynote speeches. The first keynote speech was by Prof Giovanni De Micheli  of EPFL and the second keynote speaker was Janusz Rajski from Mentor.

Prof Giovanni is a renowned Synthesis expert, His book on Synthesis is considered as the most important text book on Synthesis.  I was very happy to see him in person.  But as he started his speech and moved towards the middle of the speech, I realized that perhaps he is not best fit as a keynote speaker on Test. He would be perfectly good on DAC; but perhaps a bit misfit for the keynote role in ATS.

Janusz started his keynote on Future of Test from EDA and Design perspetive. The topic was very interesting. Janusz is one of the renowned Test gurus in the world. I wanted him to take an industry  visonary role today and was hoping that he would not be just trying to Mentor's Test. Janusz started with a difference. He asked most of the lights in the hall to be switched off. He said people who are jet-lagged could take some rest also.  He used a background which he said resembled like nano-tubes. First he showed all pictures of himself and his family on some mountaineering trips. It was kinda irrevelant. But you know he is a big guy and you need to appreciate anything good or bad from people like him. After multiple pictures, he went to the outline of his presentation.

Janusz emphasized the importance of Scan Compression. He showed some of the most influential papers published in Compression till now. He chose to ignore Adaptive Scan (Synopsys DFTMAX) in that list of papers. He showed his own EDT paper of ITC 2001, Survey of Compression by Nur Touba, and one more paper from Cadence folks on OPMISR.  I was surprised to see DFTMAX being ignored here. Mentor and Synopsys almost dominate Test; Cadence is a relatively minor player in Test. I was a bit skeptical at that point if Janus was wearing the cap of a visionary in Test or just the cap of Mentor! He then mentioned something important which kinda gave a reason for exclusion of DFTMAX.  He said any (compression) technology that has endured for 10 years is worth a technology to be mentioned as path-breaking in that slide. I may be wrong in th exact words that he used for this sentence; but this was the essence of his statement!

Janusz also mentioned one very important thing about Scan Compression. He said that any Compression solution which does not work like the pure Scan is not useful. He showed some of his slides from his keynote speech in ATS 2001 in Kyoto and ATS 2005 in Calcutta where predicted that the future of Test was Scan Compression. He said now he felt proud that he could foresee the future. At this point, I had a question for him which I asked him later during Q&A.

Janusz told about two technologies that he believed would be the future of Test going forward. One was hierarchical based DFT and the other was a hyrid of Scan Compression and BIST. The first is definitely true and no one in Test can deny that. I am a bit doubtful about the second. Mentor bought LogicVision sometime back and got the BIST technology. BIST is an old technology and it preceds Scan Compression.But BIST was never completely adopted by the design community in the way Compression found the widespread acceptance. Then will a hybrid of Scan Compression and BIST will be useful and successful? Janusz emphasized this point again when he concluded his speech.

Then time came for Q&A. The program was running about 15 minutes late. So Ravi Srivaths, one of the co-chairs of the organizing committee told that only two questions be permitted. I stood first and luckily there was a girl from Crowne Plaza hotel standing with a mic near me. So I got the opportnity to ask Janus  aquestion. Janus showed some slides from his ATS 2001 presentation today. On that context, I asked him which one or two slides from his today's presentation that he thought he could present in ATS 2021 if he is invited to give a keynote in ten years from now. He first didn't understsand my question. I think Ravi explained him my question. Janusz said that he ddn't want to feel accountable for something; but it was a good question. He went on explaining the virtues of hiearchical DFT and hybrid solution of Compression and BIST. He said he hoped these two woulo be the future.

Then the paper presentation session started. I attended the session on Timing and Clock which my colleague Pramod was moderating. All the four papers in this session was presented by four professors and three of them are quite renowned. First one was a profesor from Japan on Testing Transition delay faults in Clock. The next three papers were presented by Prof Krishnenu Chakrabarty of Duke, Prof Jacob Abraham of Texas, Austin and Prof Abhijit Chatterjee of Georgia Tech. It was very good to see these people presenting. Prof Krish Chakrabarty was the PhD advisor of my colleague Anshuman Chandra. Later I had a good conversation with Prof Chakrabarty. Pramod did an excellent job of charing the session. He was very planned and neat. He collected the bios of the all the presenters beforehand and introduced them well. He also collected the abstract of their papers in case he had to ask some questions to them.

Lunch was good; but I ate a light one because I had to present a paper immediately after lunch. My session was to be chaired by a professor from Japan. He didn't collect my bio or anything. He just took my business card and introduced me from the card.

As I went to the podium, I was a bit nervous on the title slide. But very soon I regained my confidence and was able to explain the stuffs pretty well. In the audience, there were many familiar faces - Rohit, Pramod and many of my ex-colleagues from Cadence.

Asian Test Symposium 2011: Part I

It all started with an email that Prof Abhijit Chatterjee from Georgia Tech sent to my manager Rohit Kapur in the first week of February stating that he wanted to meet with the Test people in Synopsys Bangalore. Prof Chatterjee was going to be the General Chair of ATS 2011 to be held in Delhi in November. He was trying to meet the people from academic and industry in India in order to drum up support for the conference.

There are four  Test conferences that happen annually - ITC, VTS, ETS and ATS. International Test Conference (ITC) is the most premier conference of all these. I think next comes VLSI Test Symposium (VTS). Both ITC and VTS happen in US. European Test Symposium (ETS) and Asian Test Symposium (ATS) rotate amongst countries in Europe and Asia respectively. ATS usually comes to India once in every decade. ATS 2011 would be 20th ATS.

Prof Chatterjee came to meet us on February 10th in our Synopsys Bangalore office. He was accompanied by Prof Viren Singh of IISc. My friend and colleague Parthajit and I met them for some time where they explained us about the Test Oddysey theme for this ATS. We then took them to lunch at Indijoes at RMZ Infinity.

We submitted two papers to the conference. Both of these were already filed as US patents in USPTO. One was on the concept of Predicting Test Compression QoR and the other one was on something called Cyclical Adaptive Scan (CAS). Both the papers were accepted. So I got the opportunity to travel.I'd be presenting the Compression Maximizer paper. My colleague Pramod was invited to be a moderator for one of the sessions. So both of us would travel from Synopsys Bangalore to attend ATS in Delhi.

But there was a bit of a problem. We were expecting our second baby and Gitika's expected date of delivery (EDD) was Dec 14th. We had some buffers so that I could go and present the paper in ATS. I was still a bit hesitant. As usual, Gitika is one of the brave ladies I've ever met. If I would have been in her place, I would have never let my spouse to travel in such a crucial time.But Gitika was exactly opposite. She was encouraging me to attend ATS and present the paper. One day Rohit called me and spoke to Gitika about my travel. She told Rohit also that I should travel.

Gitika's sugar level was high. So her gynecologist told us that we won't wait till EDD. Finally we planned Novemver 25th as her day for c-sec. I'd come back to Bangalore after the end of the last day of ATS on Nov 23rd and get her admitted on Nov 24th night.

But something different was waiting for me..

I landed in Delhi on Nov 20th, Sunday, one day ahead of ATS in order to meet my old friends in Noida. I visited Utpal da's family and had lunch there. After that, I went to meet my ex-colleague and friend Subhasish. He has newly constructed a beautiful house in Noida. Utpal da dropped us at our C.R. Park hotel later in the evening.