6 0740-7475/86/1200-0006$1.00 t IEEE IEEE DESIGN & TEST

Eastern EuropeThere is not a lot of interaction

with Eastern European countriesexcept at major world level events.Clearly, we must not underestimateEastern Europe's capability in elec-tronics; however, most researcherswho make it to Western conferences

information

Western EuropeAs just implied, the bulk of activity

in what we call the informationtechnology industry is in WesternEurope-specifically in the 12 coun-tries of the European EconomicCommunity, which are denoted bythe * in the box below. There is alsomuch good work outside the EEC,however. Austria is home to a num-

ber of semiconductor houses andproduces research in testing. TheSwiss watch industry, reeling from

exhibit a very strong bias towardsthe theoretical and mathematicalaspects of language and formalproof. The general opinion is thatthis reflects an overall lack ofcomputing and electronics hardwareat these facilities.

technology

the impact of the Japanese digitalrevolution, has moved heavily intothe silicon foundry and chip pack-aging business. The Nordic countrieshave a strong affinity and (togetherwith EEC member Denmark) havecreated a very effective NORCHIPfoundry network, similar to MOSIS.I was impressed by the automatedchip layout efforts I saw during arecent trip to Norway.

TheEEC SPIRITThe EEC has done much in the last

eight years to increase the effective-ness of Europe in microelectronicsand information technology. Themain funding, from Brussels, con-cerns cooperative projects withnames like Eureka and Esprit. Thenext round of Esprit, called Esprit 2,will begin in 1988 and is expected toinvolve more than 10,000 man-yearsof effort in VLSI technology andCAD alone.The primary goal of these projects

is to foster cooperation. Coopera-tion is key to any growth Europe willexperience in design and test. Inmost respects, the region is a loosecollection of countries-all withdifferent cultures, living standards,and, above all, languages. Thanks tothe IEEE and its journals, a knowl-edge of English is required to beabreast of electronics. In fact, it is ade facto standard for any Europeanmeeting in this field. Luckily, mostEuropeans, with the exception ofthe lazy English, are fluent in threeor four languages. Philips, head-quartered in Eindhoven, The Neth-erlands, insists on working in Eng-lish, but it is probably the onlypan-European organization that uses

English all the time in all depart-ments. At any rate, the drawback ofhaving over 12 local languages can-not be underestimated; it is still amajor task to move jobs from onecountry to another.

Thus, cooperation is paramountto Europe's success in informationtechnology. It is sobering to reflectthat in semiconductors the com-bined total European R&D expendi-ture far exceeds that of Japan, yetEurope is in a weak third place interms of worldwide sales.There is a strong interest in stan-

dards, in data exchange, for exam-ple. Despite the temptation to createsomething uniquely European, mostorganizations want to contribute toa global standard for the good of theindustry as a whole.The Esprit project has helped a

great deal to break down the barriersbetween workers in microelec-tronics. There is now a healthyrespect and understanding formutual efforts, and several collabo-rative efforts have produced good

December 1986

Cooperation is paramountto Europe's success in

7

results. An article will appear in afuture issue of D&T that describesthe CVT project (by Luciano Leproniof CSELT, Italy) in which no fewerthan 28 organizations across fourcountries were able to jointly pro-duce an integrated set of VLSI CADtools based on many innovativeconcepts.Work is done without collabora-

tion, of course. Most major Euro-pean countries have their ownnational microelectronics initiatives.For example, the UK Alvey projecthas produced some good results insoftware engineering and Al re-search. Even so, most countriesrealize that to make any kind ofsignificant impact on the market,they need to band together.

CURRENTEFFORTSThe IT industry in Europe is domi-

nated by the "Big 12" multinationals:* AEG-Telefunken* Bull (France)* CGE (France)* GEC (UK)* ICL (UK)* Nixdorf (FRG)* Olivetti (Italy)* Philips (The Netherlands)* Plessey (UK)* Siemens (FRG)* STET (Italy)* Thomson (France)Most of the Japanese and US

computer, semiconductor, and CADcompanies also have a strongpresence in Europe. Several, forexample, IBM, TI, ITT, and NationalSemiconductor, have significantEuropean development teams.

Luxembourg, Spain, Portugal,Greece, Ireland, and Denmark arechiefly characterized by strongnational microelectronics centers,several good universities, and play-ing host to foreign semiconductorcompanies.

Belgium has a strong involvementwith CAD and VLSI via Leuven Uni-versity and the IMEC center. Thefirst of our articles in this specialissue is by Hugo De Man and hiscolleagues, who describe work witharchitectural front-end silicon com-pilers. The latest version of the sys-tem, known as Cathedral-Il, reflectsthe local development of a Europeanlu CMOS process. It represents adecade of cooperation with majorcompanies throughout Europe inadvanced chip design.The CAD company Silvar Lisco has

its origins in Leuven, but Belgiumand The Netherlands are totallydominated by Philips, and the Eind-hoven, Delft, and Twente Universi-ties produce good research. Thesecond article in this issue is byPhilips workers Frans Beenker andFrank Peacock and their colleagues.This team is very much concernedwith the need for a consistent teststrategy across boards and chips.Frans is known throughout the worldas a founder of the joint Test ActionGroup. JTAG is attempting to requiresemiconductor suppliers to maketheir chip test features more visibleand to move towards a unifiedboundary scan approach to reducethe problems of testing boards withcomplex VLSI chips.Most of indigenous European in-

dustry is found in Italy, France,Germany, and England. There are

also many well-known universitiesand research groups in these coun-tries. However, the relationshipsbetween industry and academia varyfrom country to country.

INDUSTRIESFor our purposes, we will talk

about the European design and testindustry in terms of subindustriesthat contribute to some aspect ofthese fields.

Progress seems to be character-ized by innovative approaches toproblem-solving. A good exampleof this is described in our third arti-cle, by Joachim Mucha and his col-leagues at the University of Hanover.Professor Mucha was previously atAachen University, FRG, where hewas a key member of the team thatpioneered self-test and coined theterm "BILBO register." The articledescribes work on a set of self-test-ing chips to investigate various side-effects.

Test equipmentThe test equipment industry is

very small; only a few companies,such as Membrain and Marconi inthe UK, operate in this field. Someof the big electronics companies stilldesign and construct their own test-ers for use in-house.

Telecommunicationsandsemiconductors

Philips and Siemens have com-bined forces in a massive investment,the Mega project, to produce mega-

IEEE DESIGN & TEST8

bit RAMs. Key efforts also comefrom STC, GEC, and Plessey in theUK; Thomson; and SGS in Italy. AUK company, Inmos, has produceda most interesting VLSI component,called the transputer. Apart frompioneering some novel designmethods, now seen in Racal's Isisdesign workstation, Inmos hasdeveloped a parallel processinglanguage called Occam for trans-puter systems and for synthesis ofsilicon circuits.A recent start-up called ES2 Euro-

pean Silicon Structures is one of thefirst companies with the goal ofoperating across Europe as a high-technology, low-volume direct-writeE-beam silicon foundry.

ComputersThe mainframe computer industry

is represented by Bull, ICL, and Sie-mens. Bull is strongly linked toHoneywell technology and code. ICLdesigns the only mainframes with anon-US order code and marketsthem in approximately 60 countries.Siemens manufactures IBM com-patibles.

Olivetti and Nixdorf are rapidlyexpanding in the office and mediumsize systems markets. Together withPhilips, the major innovations in de-sign automation come from thesecompanies, with a strong push foradvanced technology.There is also a growing tendency

in many divisions of all these com-puter manufacturers to design localversions of their products usingadvanced Japanese technology. Anumber of these Japanese collabo-rations have proved effective. ICL's3900 Level 80 mainframe, for exam-ple, uses the Fujitsu cube.

CADThe well-known logic simulator,

Hilo, was developed at Brunel Uni-versity in the UK. It has reached theUS through GenRad. There is also alot of interest in hardware descrip-tion languages. Dacapo of Dort-mund University, FRG, and Ella ofRSRE in the UK are excellent exam-ples of products that could be tech-nically superior to VHDL but areprobably destined for a small role inlight of the US DoD push.

CONCLUSIONAs you can see, there is no short-

age of activities to report on. Myonly regret is that we don't havemore room to print all the articlessubmitted. Even my introduction issketchy, but its purpose was merelyto provide a glimpse into the busyworld that is design and test inEurope. i;

ACKNOWLEDGMENTSI thank Mariagiovanna Sami at Poli-

tecnico de Milano, Italy and BernardCourtois of IMAG in Grenoble, Francefor their expert help in soliciting papersfor this issue, as well as all my Europeanfriends for their support in collectingthem. I also thank all those who sub-mitted papers that were not published.Finally, I thank Vishwani Agrawal for hisassistance in finalizing the issue.

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Anm11

Gordon Adshead ismanager of VLSI sys-tems at the MainframeSystems Division of ICL,Manchester, UK. Hemanages a team re-sponsible for devel-oping a highly inte-grated multichip paral-lel processor system.

He is also a member of the Group TechnicalStrategy committee responsible for ICL'scorporate DA strategy. Adshead hasworked in design automation since 1962.He has built up and managed the large DAprogramming effort to support in-housetechnology and test equipment groups.Other activities include serving as D&T's

international editor/Europe and chairmanof UKDA, the British consortium bn CADfor VLSI. He is a member of the EDIFSteering Committee and chairman of theEuropean EDIF group. He serves on theVLSI board of the UK national semiconduc-tor project Alvey and as a consultant to theEEC. He was involved in establishing theVLSI CAD plan as part of the Esprit project.Adshead is the European representative

of ACM SIGDA and a member of the IEEEand the British Computer Society. Hisaddress is ICL, Wenlock Way, West Gorton,Manchester M12 5DR, UK.

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