Big tester on campus
Rick Nelson, Editor in Chief -- Test & Measurement World, 12/1/2008 2:00:00 AM
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Test research is getting a helping hand through a cooperative effort of the Semiconductor Test Consortium (STC) and Auburn University. With STC support, Auburn has won a National Science Foundation grant to obtain an open-architecture semiconductor test system, which will enable much needed research into integrated-circuit test.
In an interview at the International Test Conference, Paul Roddy, a technical manager at Advantest, and Adit Singh, the James B. Davis Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Auburn and chair of the IEEE Test Technology Technical Council, discussed Auburn’s acquisition of the tester. Said Roddy, “Last year at ITC, Gadi Singer [VP and GM of Intel’s mobility group] in a keynote speech said it’s getting more and more difficult to provide test capabilities.” Roddy then added, “Our design capabilities are outpacing our test capabilities, and we’ve got to have some changes in test.”
Roddy, who serves as co-chair of the STC University Working Group (UWG), said a key effort of the group is the alignment of goals: “Our member companies want to make sure that academia is working on projects that will be transferred to industry. Within the STC we have a lot of clout—with more than 30 member companies—and we can go to government agencies and say, 'this is really an important research project, and we need to get funding for it.’”
Getting a tester on campus, however, represents only a part of the picture. Roddy noted that an on-campus tester might get used only 10% of the time. Singh elaborated, saying “To maintain a test facility requires a full-time staff. It’s possible to get a two- or three-year grant, or to get a piece of equipment donated, but it’s very hard at a university to get a position or multiple positions funded for support staff. That’s been part of the reason why donations sit there and gather dust.”
Auburn is taking a multifaceted approach to make sure its tester doesn’t gather dust. Singh said Auburn plans to open up the tester to other universities, whose researchers can log on over the Internet. Also under consideration, Singh said, is the hiring of a support person who could offer classes to commercial test-equipment users. “We could send our customers to Auburn for training,” Roddy noted.
Yet another facet in the process of effectively using an on-campus tester is getting access to real-world wafers. Manufacturers, said Roddy, “don’t like to give you bad devices, which are what you need to try out your test algorithms.” Singh noted that even wafers that are a technology node or two old but that manufacturers would be willing to share would be helpful.
The Auburn initiative shows that universities are doing their part to align industrial and academic goals. Now’s the time for industry to do its part by providing the wafers and data the university researchers need to ensure that test keeps pace with design.
Link to an edited transcript of my interview with Roddy and Singh, where they elaborate on Auburn’s role in test research and on an open-architecture tester’s advantages in a university environment.
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This idea has been tried and tested in the past. Just visit nnttf.ecu.edu.au. They have a V93k system. While this sounds great in theory, in practice it has been used more as a big piece of hardware that looks great in group photos, and gets wows! from visitors.
The only party that will be happy, is the tester vendor that has been able to flog off another tester.
The main problem here is that these tester are so specific and so poorly interfaced that only handful of engineers know how to use them properly, let alone dig into their architecture and make changes.
A better model for allowing universities to get involved in tester research, would be to involve a small test house, with them taking control of the tester and doing training, etc to students, and using the tester for commercial gain when not in use for research. My estimate is that this will probably be at best used less than 1% of the time, a total waste.
A yet better model would be to send students to advantest/verigy/... to actually get involved in a more realistic scenario, and look at the problem where it starts.
We can get back to this in a couple of years, when the service contract has run out, the engineer that turns the tester on/off has left, and we are left with a rapidly depreciating piece of hardware, where the depreciation rate is more than the professor's salary.
A. Moini - 2009-29-1 20:46:00 EST -
Testers on campus are not new. Since about 2001, Texas Instruments and Teradyne have worked together to place Mixed Signal testers at several Universities, including Texas A&M and McGill University. Special training is a continuing project to develop new equipment and test engineers. Presently they are also using the new "Open-architecture" FLEX tester in their training.
Larry Lovell - 2009-22-1 12:41:00 EST
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