ATE Companies Say Rambus R&D Was Worth It
RDRAM prepped industry on testing speed, accuracy
By Jeff Chappell
Automated test equipment (ATE) companies say they are poised to reap benefits from the time, effort and money that went into research and development for testing direct Rambus DRAM (RDRAM), even if the market for Rambus-enabled testers never grows beyond a small niche market.
For at least two large ATE companies, Rambus Inc. enabled them to put new testers on DRAM manufacturers' floors, perhaps opening a memory test market that in recent years has been locked up by competitors. For those ATE companies that already own the memory test market, Rambus research taught the old dogs some new tricks for high-speed memory test that they plan to use to maintain their market dominance.
Agilent Technologies Inc., Palo Alto, Calif., was there before any of its competitors, working with Rambus at the beginning of the decade when Agilent was still part of Hewlett-Packard Co.
Early on Agilent was the only ATE player that had a tester that was fast enough to test Rambus technology. Agilent says the millions of dollars spent on R&D is money well spent. For one thing, it has been able to leverage its Rambus testing technology and use it in its flash memory testers.
Perhaps more importantly, according to Vince Lopopolo, Agilent's product marketing manager for test products, Rambus has helped put Agilent memory testers on the test floors of all the major DRAM manufacturers, a market traditionally dominated by the likes of Advantest Corp. and Teradyne Inc. That could prove invaluable in the long run, according to Lopopolo.
Similarly, Schlumberger Ltd., based in New York, said RDRAM helped put Schlumberger testers in several major DRAM makers' fabs, creating relationships that continue today, said Robert Graybeal, Schlumberger marketing director of memory test systems.
As for recouping the cost of development, in the end Schlumberger will recover the costs needed to develop the core technology, adapting it to reflect whatever high-speed memory comes to dominate the market, be it double data rate (DDR) or some other form of evolutionary SDRAM technology, Graybeal said.
Schlumberger may have been one of the later companies to jump into the RDRAM tester arena, but it feels it has the least to lose, having incorporated existing technology to develop its low-parallel Rambus offerings.
Old Dogs, RDRAM Tricks
The two companies that hold most of the memory test market, Japanese company Advantest and American ATE company Teradyne, say they feel that Rambus only helped to cement their hold on the market. Some observers consider Teradyne the shrewdest player in the RDRAM test game. Rather than build a tester from the ground up, late in the game the company rolled out a Rambus test module for existing test platforms.
"I don't know if it was shrewdness or luck, but we had a conscious decision about what we were going to do," said Glenn Farris, who is responsible for Teradyne's high-speed memory marketing efforts.
Farris noted that memory has always been, and probably always will be, a high-volume commodity that is by its nature evolutionary. When Rambus started to gain momentum, Teradyne began working with Intel and Rambus to understand the test issues involved, but decided to adapt existing technology primarily for engineering tests of RDRAM and such competing technologies as DDR. "High volumes weren't going to be occurring for these high-speed memory devices for some time," Farris added.
Advantest took a similar route. The SDRAM test leader realized it needed to get a Rambus tester on the market, at least one that could be used for engineering purposes, explained Gary Fleeman, memory product manager for Advantest America, Advantest's domestic subsidiary.
Hedging its bets, the company also geared its Rambus-enabled test systems for the latest generations of SDRAM as well as DDR.
Advantest sold more of these systems for SDRAM test than anything else, Fleeman noted. "We made it clear within the company that we weren't going to give up market share to test Rambus," he said.
Both Teradyne and Advantest credit Rambus with helping prepare the ATE industry for testing later generations of high-speed memory. "Rambus testing and preparing to test it for production taught us all a lot about accuracy. We're leveraging that in the next version of our DDR tester, and that's the truth," Fleeman said.
Thus Teradyne and Advantest feel they are well positioned regardless of the fate of RDRAM. Since they are the established and experienced memory test leaders, perhaps it's only natural that the two companies question whether competitors can use Rambus as a springboard into the memory test market, especially if it is relegated to niche-product status.
Fleeman pointed out that RDRAM testing allowed test companies to start out on a level playing field. But if DDR or some other form of evolutionary SDRAM becomes the predominant form of high-speed memory, it likely will be companies experienced in testing these types of memories that will continue to dominate the market.
"I think in the memory business there are a lot of unique requirements for memory testing," Farris observed. These are requirements that Advantest and Teradyne know well, he said. Many newcomers have approached testing RDRAM as they would a high-speed logic device, concentrating on its ASIC chip. "I'm not sure how much real memory experience they may have gained by working on Rambus," Farris added. |
