News

Phyworks selects DELTA Microelectronics to test the award-winning PHY1060 IC

Hengoed, South Wales – December 15th, 2005 – DELTA Microelectronics has been selected by Phyworks, the advanced optical networking semiconductor specialist, to devise and implement a test-plan for Phyworks’ award-winning* PHY1060 IC. The PHY1060 EDC (Electronic Dispersion Compensation) device enables serial 10Gb/s transmission over legacy multimode legacy fibre in Local Area Networks (LANs).

In conjunction with Phyworks’ 10Gb/s PHY1090 linear transimpedance amplifier (TIA), the PHY1060 enables the first complete EDC receive path solution for the IEEE’s 10GBASE-LRM standard. Both devices are currently sampling select customers.

Tim Esparon, Phyworks’ VP of Manufacturing Operations, comments: “By facilitating data rate upgrades from 1Gb/s to 10Gb/s on existing fiber infrastructure, the PHY1060 enables a significantly lower cost alternative to fiber replacement or other opto-electronic means to enterprise LAN implementers”.

The combination of high-speed and complexity of the PHY1060 presents a major challenge at die and package level production test. Phyworks has outsourced the test and implementation to DELTA Microelectronics, having collaborated on a number of projects in the past.

DELTA Microelectronics’ Managing Director Mohamed Wahab says: “There are many challenges associated with testing complex and high-speed digital devices, including the need to strike a balance between high test coverage and low test time and cost.”

DELTA has extensive expertise in developing test solutions for high-speed digital devices, RFICs and mixed-signal chips, and has extensive libraries of test IP blocks, developed over many years of activity in this field, used to shorten test development cycles for its customers. The company will use its Agilent 93000 SoC test platform to test the PHY1060.

Understanding the effective test cost parameters is important. Wahab adds: “The key to IC test costs is the ‘unit cost’ - and not just achieving a low test time. We aim to provide our customers with robust testing of their ICs at a low unit cost. We have worked closely with Phyworks on a number of projects to achieve low unit testing cost through concurrent and parallel testing as well as test programme optimisation at various stages of the development and production cycles.”