ITC: ATE companies team with chip makers, OSAT

Driven by economic forces, five ATE makers came together yesterday under the CAST banner in an effort to foster precompetitive collaboration. Representatives of the nine companies supporting the CAST initiative so far—Advantest, Amkor, Infineon, Intel, LTX-Credence, Qualcomm, Roos Instruments, Teradyne, and Verigy—took the stage at the International Test Conference yesterday to discuss their reasons for forming CAST, which stands for "Collaborative Alliance for Semiconductor Test."

Debbora Ahlgren, VP and chief marketing officer of Verigy and co-chair of the CAST planning group, said, “The industry has got to point where quite frankly we need to work together to achieve greater efficiency, so what we’ve done is pull together a foundational team,” including IDMs, fabless semiconductor companies, and an OSAT as well as the ATE makers.

Bob Helsel, who manages the Semiconductor Test Consortium (STC) and is supporting the CAST group from an operations standpoint, emphasized that the nine companies represented are not yet official members of the organization, pending the development of formal membership criteria. Helsel and many of the representatives on stage called for participation from other companies as well—including EDA firms and handler makers.

The CAST initiative would seem to represent a setback of sorts for the STC. Klaus Luther of Infineon suggested as much when he noted that his company, an STC member, had received feedback that a test-standards initiative would need broader participation than what the STC has achieved. “A standard is only as good as its level of usage—it’s not enough just to publish one,” he said. STC has among its members chip companies, handler companies, and others, but among the ATE industry, only Advantest and Roos have participated fully. LTX-Credence does participate, but only on efforts such as the STIX initiative, which focuses on standards efforts surrounding the tester. In fact, it seems likely that CAST will ultimately assume the STIX programs.

Indeed, CAST will not address standards within the tester, said Ahlgren and others, citing the need for standards outside the tester dealing with, for example, mechanical interface issues.

Why wouldn’t the other ATE makers simply follow the LTX-Credence lead and join the STIX effort while avoiding the STC’s OpenStar inside-the-tester standards? Politically, Teradyne and Verigy simply weren’t going to join an organization so closely associated with Advantest. But economic reality set in, and the ATE makers came to the realization that they must collaborate on at least some precompetitive issues to thrive. The politically expedient compromise was to form an independent organization.

Will it be independent enough? The lock Advantest has on the mindset surrounding ATE standardization was apparent in the erroneous headline on our breaking report on CAST yesterday. It initially carried the headline “Advantest-headed test group could challenge or complement STC.” Advantest, of course, doesn’t “head” the group, except in a list of member names arranged alphabetically.