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Inspection techniques have clearly become an essential part of “test.” X-ray inspection, once relegated to the sidelines of sampling and spot-checking, has been pushed to the forefront by ball-grid arrays and other hidden-node architectures. Automated optical inspection emerged to reduce inconsistencies in manual techniques caused by operator fatigue and by ever-smaller inspection targets.

But inspection, too, has its limitations. The tradeoff between resolution, field of view, and speed becomes more serious as circuits get smaller and more crowded, and constant price erosion increases the clamor for higher throughput and reduced costs. Proponents of today's techniques can't make the mistake of becoming complacent.

New semiconductor materials, organic circuitry, and other breakthroughs will eventually push both inspection vendors and test strategists to find creative new solutions. One recent example was an announcement last month by Hewlett-Packard about the creation of memristors. These alternatives to transistors, first proposed more than 30 years ago by Professor Leon Chua at UC Berkeley, will dramatically shrink logic once again, yet will retain their information even when power is off.

“We've always done it that way” has never sufficed to meet tomorrow's technology challenges. We always have to look forward.