Fault coverage

To London Jin:
This is a great article. ("Don't Abuse Fault Coverage" by London Jin, ISD Magazine, July 2000 p.16) It reflects the real challenges (hard to solve, hard to persuade) and the problems (misunderstanding by the management persons, design persons and customers) which the DFT engineers encounter in their work. Do we vote on the article? My vote is A.

Toan Quang Nguyen
Senior Design Engineer
Phillips

Mixed-signal queries

This is regarding the article "Challenges of Mixed-Signal Design" (by Vlad Bril and Nilesh Amin, ISD Magazine June 2000 p. 48) in your June issue. While it appears to be a nice advertisement for Toshiba's TAEC services, it did not seem to provide much detail on how to deal with mixed-signal product validation. Other than a brief reference to how digital design was handled by listing a set of tools including Synopsys' Design Compiler and Primetime, there was no mention of the issues of simulating the interaction of the digital and analog blocks. Was any attempt made to simulate the full-chip functionality? The article gives me the impression that the analog functions were only verified with the digital logic after silicon was produced. I would appreciate any clarification that you can provide.

Rod Rebello
Director of CAD
Microchip Technology Inc.

ISD Magazine replies: We hope to have further discussion from the authors in our November issue.

ISD website

Hi Mr. Dean,
I was browsing the isdmag.com site, and was attracted by one of your magazine article with the following url: http://www.isdmag.com/ic-logic/xilinx/xilinxvideo.html Unfortunately, all the pictures in this article are missing. Would you kindly provide me the missing pictures? Is that a deliberate move due to copy-right issue? If so, please suggest a way to get access to the original article. Thanks in advance. Lastly, congradulation on successfully maintaining the www.isdmag.com site. It's been bookmarked and frequently visited for new design hints.

cheers,
Lee YeuSheuan

ISD Magazine replies:
Thanks for the input. We'll fix it straight away.