Product: IConnect Software
inTEST Corporation was founded in 1981 in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. The company is a leading independent designer, manufacturer, and marketer of test head manipulator and docking hardware products, thermal test systems, and customized test interface solutions. These products are used by semiconductor manufacturers to perform final testing and characterization of integrated circuits and wafer products.
inTEST manufactures its test head manipulator and docking hardware products in New Jersey, the United Kingdom, Germany and Singapore; it's thermal test systems in Massachusetts; and tester interface products in California and the United Kingdom. All of these products enable semiconductor manufacturers to enhance their profitability by improving the efficiency of their IC and wafer test processes.
Bill Brooks, is an Engineering Manager for inTEST and is responsible for new product design in the Company.
Brooks uses TDA System's IConnect Software for design verification testing and characterization of inTEST's new products. When asked to describe his experience using IConnect Brooks said:
"Our experience with IConnect has been excellent! It is easy to use, has a broad range of useful features, and we can easily input files from our FDTD modeling tool. It produces Zo profiles, performs parameter extraction, produces S - parameters, models eye-diagrams, etc. that we use daily to guide our design decisions.
IConnect's ability to exchange data files with other test equipment is extremely helpful and allows us to exchange files quickly and easily saving us time".
Summary:
As modern signaling standards push digital designs to the gigahertz and gigabit ranges, interconnect performance becomes a key factor in enabling reliable system operation. Signal Integrity issues such as reflections, crosstalk, frequency dependent transmission line loss and dispersion can significantly degrade system performance and reliability. Ability to simulate and accurately predict the effect of these signal integrity issues is critical to achieving a working design, and this ability is contingent on the designer's ability to obtain accurate interconnect models for each part of the interconnect link from the driver chip, through the package into the daughtercard; through a high-speed backplane connector to the backplane, and to the cable interconnect between subsystems. Other factors also come into play. In the present environment, cost savings associated with the necessary test and measurement are also a key factor. If you're not using TDA Systems IConnect,you're missing the majority of information available to you and your testing is much more difficult than it needs to be.