2011 Conference Summary
2011 ITC Summary
ITC 2011 was a great success! Even in a compressed year—-this year’s conference was nearly six weeks ahead of 2010—-many sessions were standing-room only. It all kicked off with a packed ballroom for our Monday night panel consisting of industry leaders from all segments of our community (board, foundry, IDM, ATE and EDA). This exciting panel was then topped off with a great venue for participants to get reacquainted during a beer bash in one of the beautiful gardens of our host site Disneyland.
The conference plenary featured a terrific keynote address by Dr. Bill Dally, Stanford University Engineering Professor, and Chief Scientist of Nvidia Corporation. Professor Dally described the many challenges that must be addressed to create an ExaScale computer, and the unique test problems that must be solved to ensure long-term reliable operation. Carrying on a tradition that was started last year, our invited speaker focused on an unconventional topic outside of testing. Disney Imagineer Chuck Davis described the process they use to create a Disney ‘Spectacular,’ the World of Color show. ITC participants experienced World of Color first-hand during a private showing after the Tuesday Welcome Reception in Disney’s Bugs Land. Our final speaker, Dr. Jyou-Min Shyu, President of Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute, gave a wonderful keynote address about the process they use to translate scientific discoveries into successful technologies for the marketplace.
In addition to our top-notch speakers, we had a dynamic exhibit floor that had more participants from the previous year that featured industry suppliers displaying their latest products and technologies. The exhibit floor also served as the venue this year for a lunchtime poster session that featured nearly thirty posters from practitioners and academicians from around the globe on topics that ranged from process debug to the test of Quantum-Dot Cellular Automata FPGAs.
Our technical sessions included relevant and timely topics that featured, for example, defect-oriented test of analog and mixed-signal circuits, microprocessor test and debug, DFT advances, yield enhancement via volume diagnosis, and 3D test. As in previous years, ITC also featured special sessions that included the TTTC/IEEE Ph.D. Dissertation Award Finals, “Elevator Talks” on more than a half-a-dozen novel and out-of-the-box ideas from leading academic researchers, and a partner-conference session that featured the best presentations from the International Solid-State Circuits Conference. The technical sessions were also complemented by a daily panel on an important topic that included in-circuit test, post-silicon debug, and a plenary panel on test challenges and solutions unique to Asia.