ATE systems¿current trends and integration into CAE environments

With the current industry trend towards the extensive use of LSI and VLSI integrated circuits, testing costs are changing from the traditional 5-10% to as much as 45%¿and even more in some cases. The capabilities, limitations and costs of LSI and VLSI ATE for integrated circuits are consequently having a major impact on engineers and engineering management. At the same time the market is moving towards a state where it will be dominated by semi-custom and custom circuits, thus increasing the demand to forge links between CAE and testing operations. This paper examines the current trends in the ATE industry, including the emerging array of automatic hardware and software tools that take advantage of CAE´s powerful databases and stimulus/response provisions.