Stephan Eggersglüß, member of the research group on computer architecture headed by Professor Rolf Drechsler, has just received an international award for his doctoral thesis. His dissertation, which deals with improvements to the quality of testing, won the award for having the greatest impact on production testing. We are surrounded by electronics everywhere and today’s world is unimaginable without MP3 players and cell phones. It often happens that we entrust our very lives to electronic systems – sometimes without even knowing it. When we board an aircraft, for instance, or tread on the brakes of a modern automobile: all of it inconceivable without electronics.
Hardly surprising, then, that nothing but the very highest standards are good enough when it comes to the testing of such devices. But computer chips often comprise several billion components, all condensed onto a few square centimeters. Tracing possible mistakes is like looking for a pinhead in a football stadium with field glasses. That explains why upwards of 50% of the cost of producing computer chips is spent on testing.
Eggersglüß has developed new techniques which make it possible to enhance the quality of production tests. In the case of circuits used in industry, for instance, he has managed to raise the quota of tested components from 99.5 % to 99.8 %. What at first sight might appear to be rather modest, on a closer look turns out to be quite considerable. Take an electric circuit containing 1 billion components, for instance; 0.3% equates to three million elements – which would otherwise have remained untested. High quality testing techniques are absolutely essential for developing reliable products. Working together with industrial partner Philips/NXP, Eggersglüß employed highly sophisticated scientific methods to solve some practically relevant problems. His achievement in making such a significant improvement on existing methods is all the more remarkable as generating good testing patterns is an intensively researched area.
At the meeting of the International Test Conference (ITC) – the world’s leading symposium which attracts some 2,000 attendees – his work was selected as the best of the year 2010. In recognition of his outstanding achievement, Stephan Eggersglüß received the E. J. McCluskey Best 2010 Doctoral Thesis Award sponsored by the Test Technology Technical Council (TTTC) of the IEEE Computer Society. The doctoral thesis, supervised by Prof. Dr. Rolf Drechsler, was completed in October 2010 and awarded the highest rating “summa cum laude”.
