Scooping news stories is the domain of our neighbors down the hall, the guys from EE Times. ISD is supposed to be about analysis and contributed content from practicing engineers. But why let the EE Times guys have all the fun? The IEEE International Test Conference (ITC) happens every fall-this year and last in Atlantic City. There's lots to learn at the conference, some of it unofficial if you listen closely.

We were eating breakfast in the Sheraton-hoping to catch a glimpse of the Y2K Miss America contestants housed there-and lucked into a chat with somebody at the next table over. He turned out to be a test guy from one of the big semiconductor houses. We talked about EDA, test, test engineers, and the people that they service, the designers upstream that pump out the designs-designs that, more likely than not, are incompatible with downstream test.

He told us that hardware designers are prima donnas, but understandably so. These days, they're smart, savvy, and in huge demand. They think they don't need to worry about test. They think they can just "throw designs over the wall" and let the lowbrow test folks deal with the "minimal" problems that might crop up in testing.

But, according to our anonymous source, the designers are going to be in for a nasty surprise if they don't listen up. There's big trouble brewing and it's only going to get worse as the problems associated with testing big chips, multi-million gate ASICs, SOCs, and other monster designs continue to grow.

But, there's good news as well. He told us that he's got hard proof that interest is growing in test-at last.

Recently his team discovered a bug in their conference room, literally. The bug wasn't in the place where the technical details of test and test software are hammered out. The bug was in the room where test strategy is discussed, the future of the company pondered and, intriguingly, potential test partners in EDA evaluated. Somebody's catching on to the fact that test and the test tools from the EDA world are important after all. Why is that?

Simple, according to our source. The EDA vendors are providing real value in test, and all other areas of chip design and development for that matter, he says-and this from a CAD manager who specializes in test. He says the people who are pumping out the EDA software are brilliant and extremely under appreciated. He says nobody acknowledges the thousands of man-hours that go into the "frigging-marvelous EDA tools." He says the designers don't appreciate it. The test guys don't appreciate it. The semiconductor guys are way too arrogant to appreciate it. But they better start to, he says, and fast.

Developing EDA software is complex, subtle, tough to explain, and even tougher to do. He mentioned the "Yahoo guys" who got bogged down in a student project designing a simulator, bailed on it because of the complexity of it all, and designed instead a smarter search engine-child's play in comparison to the simulator project. In the process, they did nothing but add to EDA's sorrows.

Now everybody with a software brain wants to be in dot.com and EDA continues to hurt for manpower-smart, young college grads want to be instant winners at the dot.com roulette table instead of cunning software developers in under-funded, obscure EDA. So, the guys behind the EDA tools end up unappreciated, can't find the bodies to help keep the tools evolving, and struggle on to meet the demands of the new generation of design.

Meanwhile, in-house CAD development teams continue to prevail. They continue to write software on the fly to fight one design crisis or another. When the problem and the project are over, the developers move on, often leaving under-documented, poorly coded CAD tools to be jerry-rigged or rewritten outright the next time a similar problem comes along.

Our anonymous source says the vendor-supplied EDA tools are heads above this in-house stuff. It's documented, supported, improved upon regularly, and comes from a stable source that will be around next month and next year when a similar need arises within the customer base.

Advice? Test needs to "move upstairs" into the mainstream of design. Equally important? Pay attention to your EDA tools vendors, in test and in all areas of design. They know what they're doing and they're doing it quite well.