FLuence Technology Announces VCOBIST; First Test IP For Fast, Accurate Jitter Measurements of System-On-Chip Designs.

BEAVERTON, Ore.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 14, 1999--

Measures Better Than 8-ps Peak-to-Peak

Jitter in Less Than 20 Milliseconds

Fluence Technology Inc.(tm), a pioneer provider of integrated mixed-signal design and test automation solutions, today introduced the first built-in self-test (BIST) IP for making accurate jitter measurements quickly on clock and data signals within complex system-on-chip (SOC) designs.

VCOBIST (voltage-controlled oscillator BIST) enables accurate, high-speed jitter measurements in silicon with complete test times as low as 20 milliseconds (ms).

The VCOBIST approach promotes test reuse, a key component of design reuse, by giving designers a way to wrap test functions around specific design intellectual property (IP), making the IP easier to reuse.

Designers can now use VCOBIST to perform very accurate yet fast jitter measurements in pure digital BIST implementations. Until Fluence released VCOBIST, commercially available jitter measurements were performed by expensive and typically slow or inaccurate time measurement units such as oscilloscopes or some types of automatic test equipment (ATE).

"To reach the required performance levels of today's SOC data processing, data communications and telecommunications applications, precise jitter measurements must be calculated to monitor high-speed clock and data distribution applications," said Mike Kondrat, vice president of marketing, Fluence Technology. "Until now, it has been impractical to measure high-speed clock and data jitter during production due to long test times and test programming complexity."

New Patent-pending Approach Provides Extreme Efficiency

VCOBIST uses a new patent-pending algorithm developed by Opmaxx, Inc., Fluence's strategic partner, enabling fast, accurate jitter measurements to be made by using a small number of digital circuits. There are no analog circuits in the VCOBIST Test IP. Insertion into the design process is done using synthesizable Verilog or VHDL code. Control of the VCOBIST Test IP is ignal period to be measured. Both processes are

Operation

A typical example of a circuit where jitter measurements are important is a phase-lock loop (PLL) oscillator. VCOBIST measures jitter in a PLL by k jitter directly to provide very fast measurement times. Designers can use VCOBIST to verify that all clockions for PLL's or VCO's. Design libraries for VCOBIST are available for implementation in a CMOS or bipolar pVCOBIST measures peak-to-peak jitter with better than 50-ps accuracy (typical) and performs the full measureime of less than 20 ms. Maximum performance can ystem or on the load board. VCOBIST also supporing is per project and includes Verilog/VHDL libnc. is a leading provider of mixed-signal design and test automation software technology and solutions, provanies reduce time-to-market by using Fluence's t the world. Please visit the company's web site rights reserved.