The IEEE international workshop on open source test technology tools will be held from May 10-11, 2007 in Berkeley, California, and is now calling for papers.

The background of this event is the continuing struggle with interoperability issues experienced in the flow and management of test data for semiconductor and system debug, diagnosis, yield learning, maintenance, and reliability. This issue derives at least in part from attempts to erect competitive barriers, while an open source approach to this problem will be seen to be in the best commercial interest of all parties by enabling faster and more productive growth of the industry.

This open source approach includes open source tools, which provide an intermediate ground between commercial software tools and libraries on the one hand, and published standards on the other, and also proprietary tools written to leverage open architectures and open APIs. The crucial point is that no vendor or customer can afford to create a complete end-to-end test flow themselves in today's competitive environment. Openness and sharing allows each company to concentrate on the aspect of the problem they do best.