The International Test Conference, ITC, runs October 11 to 16 at the Grand Hyatt San Antonio River Walk. It’s the main yearly meeting for the people who test chips, boards and systems, and it draws about 1,000 engineers, researchers and executives. This is ITC’s first year in San Antonio. IEEE organizes it, with the IEEE Computer Society and the IEEE Texas Section.
AI hardware has made test harder and more expensive to get wrong. Accelerators now pull kilowatt-class power, ship in large multi-die packages and go into data centers where a failure in the field costs real money. ITC has added a special session on AI this year, and the program also leans on automotive test and 3D technologies, next to its usual ground of design-for-test, diagnosis, yield learning and reliability.
Teradyne (booth #204) is showing burn-in on Titan HP, its system-level test platform. Instead of sitting in an oven at a set air temperature, each device is held at its own target junction temperature while it runs a realistic workload, with thermal control at every test site. Teradyne says it’s already in production use, aimed at high-power AI accelerators, cloud chips and automotive parts. The supporter list doubles as a map of the business: Siemens is the Diamond supporter, Advantest and Synopsys are Platinum, Arm is Gold, and Cadence and Chroma ATE are Silver.
The six days mix tutorials and workshops with paper sessions, keynotes and visionary talks, plus the Industry Test Challenges meeting and ITC’s paper awards. Mind the overlap: SEMICON West opens in San Francisco on October 13. If your job is making sure silicon works before it ships, this is the week to be in San Antonio.