Registration Open for International Test Conference

LOS ALAMITOS, Calif., 10 September, 2009 – International Test Conference, the highlight of the annual Test Week activities and the leading forum for electronics test technology, promises to engage and stimulate attendees from the test and design community with its technical program and exhibits when the doors open at the 40th annual ITC. Test Week 2009 runs from November 1 - 6 at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, Texas. ITC's Advance Program and online registration are available at www.itctestweek.org.

Co-sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society, ITC is the cornerstone of Test Week and known worldwide for the strength of its technical program, which attracts many top researchers, and industry experts who choose ITC to present the results of their work. Offerings throughout the week incorporate a wide variety of technical activities targeted at test and design practitioners.

This year's comprehensive program includes formal paper sessions, tutorials, panel sessions, a lecture series, advanced industrial practices sessions, workshops, exhibits and a host of professional fringe meetings. A new Career Track, hosted by IEEE-USA will focus on today's job market, with three sessions to help engineers expand their career horizons. Taken together, these activities provide a week-long educational experience for attendees from novice to expert.

This year, the International Test Conference technical program together with other Test Week 2009 events will focus on such hot topics as test compression, power-aware test, advances in delay test, logic diagnosis, silicon debug, and high-quality test methods. Attendees will also learn more about what's going on in traditional topics such as analog, mixed-signal, RF, microprocessor test and DFT -- as well as defects, memory, ATE, and board test.

The renowned technical program offers 60 papers throughout 18 sessions, and is supplemented with a lecture series and Advanced Industrial Practices (AIP) sessions which present the latest methods and techniques used by industry leaders in addressing some of today's most important test challenges. This year's AIP sessions include interesting presentations from the Southwest Test Workshop, which focuses on wafer- and die-level testing, a session on how test can be used for yield improvement, and a session on the critical problem of validating an IC after the first silicon comes back from the fab.

ITC will also continue its tradition of presenting thought-provoking panels exploring current issues challenging the test practitioner. Beginning on Monday afternoon with a with a special panel titled 40 Years of Reliable Computing at Stanford CRC, six additional panels will also run on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday on topics including analog test technology, testing of 3D chips, power faults, physically aware DFT, predictive solutions and architectural tradeoffs for test, and on how (un) affordable the test's cost.

ITC 2009 will again host its classic poster session which promotes interaction between the attendee and presenter and provides an opportunity for late-breaking results to be presented and receive feedback. The poster session will be held on Tuesday evening, along with the Texas Beer Blast Reception.

A new Embedded Tutorial track comprised of four sessions will be held on Day 2 of the conference and offered free of charge to all registered ITC attendees. The embedded tutorials will cover topics including testing of 3D chips, new boundary-scan standards, and post-silicon validation.

ITC will also be host to a special Career Track provided by IEEE-USA. The career track will provide three sessions focused on helping engineers expand their career prospectus.

The formal opening of the conference begins with the plenary session and a keynote address by Antun Domic, SVP and GM of Synopsis' Implementation Group. Antun's presentation, Design- and Manufacturing-aware Test Is Our Future, will discuss how design, manufacturing, and test can join forces and collaborate to battle the nanometer challenges. ITC's invited speaker, Shekar Borkar, Intel Fellow, Intel Corporation, will then discuss challenges and potential solutions across disciplines, such as architecture, system design, circuits & layout, resiliency, and testing, in his presentation, Design and Test Challenges for 32 nm and Beyond.

As always, the exhibition forms a major part of ITC. Concurrent with the technical program, an exhibit floor will feature the newest equipment, software and services from all over the world for solving testing problems. A "University Booth" will again offer an opportunity for the academic community to demonstrate device/board/system testing research in areas including design verification, test, diagnosis, and failure analysis.

ITC Test Week kicks off with 12 tutorials presented by the IEEE Computer Society's Test Technology Technical Council (TTTC) on the two days prior to the conference technical program, November 1 and 2. They are geared for entry-level attendees as well as those wishing to expand their knowledge in a particular area, and cover such topics as high-speed interface testing, design-for-manufacturing, silicon debug and diagnosis, statistical screening, delay test, post-silicon validation, failure mechanisms and high-quality test methods for nanometer technologies, analog, mixed-signal and RF test, the economics of test and testability.

Closing out Test Week are three workshops to choose from on design for reliability and variability, defect- and data-driven testing, and test and validation of high-speed analog circuits. These workshops provide in-depth and up-to-the-minute views of work in these important test areas.

About ITC

ITC is sponsored by the Test Technology Council of the IEEE Computer Society and by the Philadelphia Section of the IEEE. From its beginnings as an informal gathering of engineers in 1970 at Cherry Hill, New Jersey, ITC has grown into the Test Week event, with more than a hundred papers, panels, an exhibition, tutorials, workshops, lecture series sessions, and important keynote speeches.

ITC is known for a tradition of spirited debates over test issues that continue during breaks and social gatherings. A multitude of companies choose ITC to demonstrate major new test products and services in the concurrent exhibition.

Celebrating its 40th conference year, ITC, the cornerstone of the Test Week activities, will take place at the Austin Convention Center, Austin, Texas from November 3-5, 2009. Test Week runs November 1-6, 2009. The Advance Program and registration information are available online at http://www.itctestweek.org or from the ITC office by telephone at (202) 973-8665.