Jim Healy, CEO of LogicVision, talks about the transition from a-make-to-buy-decision. What appears to be taking place is that companies who develop their own internal DFT software tools for logic are now starting to buy a commercial product. Jim draws parallels to this same phenomenon taking place in the automatic testing industry (ATE) in the sixties, where companies like TI, Motorola, and Fairchild, who developed their own testers, started to buy commercial products for many of the same reasons. This is what got Teradyne started.
Jim feels that the reason for the transition today is that the in-house solutions are seldom automated and the cost to implement them at the smaller geometries is rising. This is driving them from a-make-to-a-buy-decision. Another factor is that companies are having real difficulty maintaining expected quality levels at nanochip dimensions using traditional methods like ATPG.