Material changes
Steve Scheiber, Contributing Technical Editor -- Test & Measurement World, 3/1/2006 2:00:00 AM
In its biannual International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS), the Semiconductor Industry Association offers some bold predictions (Ref. 1). Although the document aims primarily at device-level manufacturing and test, its conclusions suggest considerable challenges at the board and system levels as well.
The ITRS predicts more aggressive scaling than it has in the past. Feature dimensions reached 90 nm in 2004, less than the 100 nm predicted for 2005 in 2001. Current expectations are for 25-nm transistor gates to arrive in 2007—six years earlier than forecasted in 1999. According to the Roadmap, by the end of the decade, memory will cost an eighth of what it does today, and microprocessor speeds will have tripled.
As features continue to shrink and devices combine numerous functions and technologies on a single piece of silicon, devices will feature either huge numbers of I/O pins or else fewer pins with the chip generating large amounts of logic and processing before sending signals out. The increasing circuit complexity will complicate test and inspection tasks at board and system levels as well. Developing comprehensive functional tests at the board level, for example, will require taking advantage of test capabilities that designers must include on the devices themselves to make them manufacturable.
Many of these technological innovations will appear first in consumer products, where enormous demand and severe price pressures will challenge manufacturers to tightly control production processes and create efficient, cost-effective test and inspection strategies at least as well as they do today. According to the Roadmap, "some of the most important test challenges are actually centered on some of the more subtle historical missions of manufacturing test—reliability and yield learning."
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| The GaAs MOSFET breakthrough was enabled by unpinning the Fermi level at the oxide-GaAs interface using a Ga2O3 template layer and a GdGaO dielectric layer. Courtesy Freescale Semiconductor. |
One of the most radical of the Roadmap's predictions—migration from silicon-based designs to molecular switches and organic packaging—will not begin to appear until after 2010. Yet, some hints of what is coming have already occurred, and the movement away from silicon-based logic recently took a giant step forward.
On January 30, Freescale Semiconductor announced the first commercially viable device that combines the high performance of GaAs semiconductor compounds with the advantages of traditional MOSFETs. Freescale says the new approach could make such operations as analog-to-digital conversions virtually instantaneous, because GaAs generates less noise and conducts electrons up to 20 times faster than traditional silicon can. Previous efforts to incorporate SiO2 dielectrics in GaAs technology proved unsuccessful. Freescale has identified other GaAs-compatible materials (photo) that provide scaling capabilities similar to those of their silicon predecessors.
The SIA Roadmap's stated purpose is to "guide shared research by industry, universities, and national labs," particularly calling attention to areas that no known manufacturing solution can support. "It is in these areas that breakthroughs in research are needed."
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Test, inspection at APEX
Test and inspection took center stage at APEX (February 8–10, Anaheim, CA; IPC, www.ipc.org). Landrex Technologies introduced two second-generation Optima 7300 Series AOI systems (pictured). ViTechnology introduced its Vision 2006 software and debuted the Vi-1K benchtop AOI system. Machine Vision Products premiered its Ultra 850G AOI system. FocalSpot announced its Concept FX BGA/SMT inspection and rework system.
Several inspection products were new to the North American market: Phoenix|x-ray's Nanotom 160-kV computed-tomography system and Nanome|x inspection systems, Viscom's S6056 AOI system for PCBs, and X-Tek Systems' Nanotech x-ray source.
For testing, Seica debuted the Aerial L4 vertical-board-clamping addition to its Pilot flying probers. Goepel Electronic introduced a FireWire-compliant member of its ScanFlex boundary-scan platform. Data I/O previewed a production programming system for high-volume duplication of multimedia cards and Secure Digital cards.
Digitaltest announced that Primus Technologies has selected a Condor system for board programming and test. W.L. Gore announced that it has added connector-assembly configuration capability to its online cable-configurator tool. Finally, Elektrobit introduced to the North American market its J401-11 "Tiny" test handler and display-tester software for LCDs and keyboards.
For details and supplier links, see www.tmworld.com/apex06.
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