Advantest's SiConic: Revolutionizing Automated Silicon Validation

In the rapidly evolving world of semiconductor technology, the need for innovative validation solutions has never been more pressing. As digital devices become increasingly complex, the demand for efficient and reliable silicon validation grows exponentially. Enter Advantest's groundbreaking solution, SiConic, designed to streamline silicon validation, enhance productivity, and confidently achieve sign-off.

SiConic is a scalable solution for automated silicon validation, addressing the challenges of rising SoC complexity and time-to-market pressures. By integrating pre-silicon verification content with post-silicon validation, SiConic enables seamless collaboration and reuse of verification content between design verification (DV) and silicon validation (SV) teams. This integration is achieved through an automated flow with PSS-based content, allowing DV engineers to leverage familiar pre-silicon techniques and expand their functional coverage in post-silicon. Similarly, SV engineers can seamlessly load, set parameters, and debug PSS-based or manually directed content on silicon, enabling rapid and reliable device bring-up and functional characterization.

SiConic's ecosystem, which includes partnerships with EDA vendors like Cadence, Siemens, and Synopsys, overcomes the barrier to reuse of verification content. This enables engineering efficiency and accelerated test execution on real silicon. By integrating with Cadence's Perspec System Verifier, for example, SiConic allows joint customers to reach unprecedented coverage and deep insights into challenging designs. This efficient reuse of verification content helps SiConic's customers achieve faster sign-off and improve the quality of their products.

SiConic's high-speed I/O (HSIO) capability, supported by its SiConic Link hardware, enables functional validation with high throughput and rich tracing capabilities during test execution. This, combined with the integration of optical instrumentation into Advantest's SmarTest 8 software platform, significantly shortens the time for opto-electrical testing and provides accurate, reliable measurements. This acceleration of test execution helps SiConic's customers meet tight time-to-market pressures while ensuring top-notch quality for high-end devices.

SiConic's scalable ecosystem cultivates an open and unified environment that hosts custom solutions and enables industry-leading partners to contribute and innovate. This scalability allows teams to easily collaborate and share resources across distributed global R&D teams working on complex SoCs with diverse IP blocks. By enabling confident sign-off decisions through team collaboration and data-driven insights, SiConic builds trust with customers receiving early samples and expecting reliable ramp and operation during the lifetime of their systems.

In conclusion, Advantest's SiConic is a groundbreaking solution for automated silicon validation, addressing the challenges of rising SoC complexity and time-to-market pressures. By integrating pre-silicon verification content with post-silicon validation, SiConic enables seamless collaboration and reuse of verification content between DV and SV teams. With its support for industry standards like PSS and partnerships with EDA vendors, SiConic is poised to revolutionize the silicon validation landscape and help its customers achieve faster sign-off, improve product quality, and meet time-to-market pressures.