TSS/ETS/Workshop

3 Professors and 9 PhD students from GS-IMTR attended the 27th IEEE European Test Symposium (ETS) from May 23th to 27th 2022 in Barcelona, Spain. This year, 20 scientific papers have been accepted for oral presentations and 18 papers have been presented in posters at ETS. Moreover, 4 invited keynote talks, 4 special sessions, 3 embedded tutorials, 2 panels, 3 vendor sessions, one PhD forum were available at ETS’22. The topics were diverse and exciting, including but not limited to RF 5G test, automobile SoC functional safety, AI-assisted yield learning, IJTAG test standard and many more. Paria Najafi of GS-IMTR presented her work “On Extracting Reliability Information from Speed Binning” at the session for “Functional Safety”. Prof. Dirk Pflüger, Prof. Krishnendu Chakrabarty, Prof. Hussam Amrouch and Matthias Sauer presented their views on machine learning for test, diagnosis, post-silicon validation and yield optimization in a special session.

Co-organized with ETS’22, the fringe workshop Intelligent Methods for Test and Reliability (1st IMTR Workshop) was also attractive, including 3 keynote talks, one panel session and 9 scientific paper presentations. 7 PhD students from GS-IMTR presented their recent work at the workshop and there were fruitful discussions after each presentation.

As usual, the Test Spring School (TSS) was offered before ETS’22 from May 20th to May 23th, 2022. The main topic of TSS’22 is “AI for IC dependability and dependability of AI ICs”, covered by 6 lectures from both industry and academia. Along with the lectures, there were two social events: visiting Sagrada Família and Park Güell. Overall, the whole event (TSS/ETS/Workshop) was exciting and inspiring.

Here is some feedback from one of our PhD students Natascha Lylina: Overall, visiting ETS and TTS is a motivating experience, especially after 2 years of Pandemic. It has been very encouraging to meet new people, as well as to meet old friends, and to see how they enhanced their research throughout those 2 years. Most of the talks at TSS were interesting. The organization was very good. We have met many interesting researchers from the whole Europe. The only minor point is that it might be easier to follow if the students would get the transcript of the lectures before the TSS started. Lecture of Prof. Amrouch was wonderful -- it would have been so nice, if he would find some time at least every half a year to present something to the GS-IMTR students! This would help to fill the gap between the pure ML-students and the test-students. The talks at ETS mostly have been done in a high quality and would help us to enhance our own research. However, the hybrid part of the event has not worked perfectly, since dynamic rescheduling on-site has not been properly and in-time transmitted to online participants. AI and ML for test is a clear trend at ETS. However, at one of the talks it was addressed that the application areas where it is relevant to use ML for enhancing test must be selected more thoroughly, and the choice of ML for solving some test problems must be better justified. At one of the talks at TSS, mostly US and few European groups have been named as the principal investigators for applying ML to test. I believe that the next milestone for GS-IMTR could be that the GS-IMTR becomes even more well-known in connection to (ML-based test), such that each further speaker includes our group to this list by default. To do this, more publications at test conferences/journals can be achieved. Thanks to GS-IMTR and Advantest for giving us such a nice opportunity to visit a leading test conference, meet new people and listen to nice and motivating talks! We really appreciate this!

Attendees:
Professors from GS-IMTR: Prof. Dirk Pflüger, Prof. Hussam Amrouch, Prof. Ilia Polian
PhD students from GS-IMTR: Andres Lalama, Denis Schwachhofer, Hanieh Jafarzadeh, Natascha Lylina, Nourhan Elhamawy, Paria Najafi, Paul Genssler, Sebastian Hasler, Yiwen Liao.
Advantest: Dr. Mattias Sauer, Georg Karich, Sarah Rottacker