Nov 15 2007
A paper by academics from the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS), has been voted one of the most influential over the past 10 years by the Design Automation and Test in Europe (DATE) conference.
DATE, one of the most prestigious conferences in electronics system level design and test in the world, is putting together a book featuring the work that has impacted most on its industry over the past 10 years, which will be published in March 2008.
The conference chairs have selected a paper entitled Improving Compression Ratio, Area Overhead, and Test Application Time for System-on-a-Chip Test Data Compression/Decompression by academics as one of the best papers in the year 2002.
The paper was written by two ex-ECS PhD students, Theo Gonciari (2002), who is now at Lehman Brothers and Nicola Nicolici (2000) who is now an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at McMaster University, and co-authored by Professor Bashir Al-Hashimi, Professor of Computer Engineering at ECS.
Systems-on-Chip are key electronic components used in hand-held and portable devices and the availability of low cost and effective manufacturing test technology is vital to keep the cost of such devices low. This paper proposed an efficient test solution that is based on using compression algorithms similar to that used successfully in compressing pictures and videos.
‘Low cost System-on-chip test solutions based on the use of compression have started to become mainstream technologies as many EDA (Electronic Design Automation) companies offer such solutions,’ said Professor Al-Hashimi. ‘This paper provides an excellent example of how academic research greatly influenced and shaped the format of how industry solves challenging problems in testing semiconductors chips.’
Rudy Lauwereins, DATE 07 General Chair added: ‘The aim of this DATE book is to highlight some of the most influential technical contributions from 10 years of the conference. Selecting 30 papers (only 10 papers from each year) has been a very challenging endeavour and, together with all 10 Programme Chairs, we have made a selection of the most influential papers covering the very broad range of topics which is characteristic of DATE.’