Evaluation Engineering - 11

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SPECIAL REPORT

SEMICONDUCTOR TEST:
VENDORS CHALLENGED BY COST OF TEST
AMID INCREASING DEVICE COMPLEXITY
By Mike Hockett, Editor-in-Chief
As the complexity of newer electronics devices increases, so do the demands on providers of semiconductor
test. Vendors of test solutions are tasked
with not hampering the productivity of
designers and always increasing the quality of their test programs-all while keeping the cost of test as low as possible. Such
vendors have become used to the innovation demands that come with mobile
electronics, but newer avenues like the
Cloud, artificial intelligence, and the onset
of 5G will provide plenty of obstacles to
overcome for years ahead.
To stay abreast of the latest trend developments in semiconductor test, challenges and demands in this area, and
what new solutions are on the market,
we at Evaluation Engineering asked a
pool of semiconductor test vendors and
partners for their input on these talking
points. Read on to see what they told us.

What's trending?
What new or ongoing trends are vendors
seeing in the area of semiconductor test?
Rob Knoth, product management director, Digital Staff Group at Cadence Design
Systems: "We're seeing an increasing role
of test in the functional mission of semiconductors, for example, with memory
and logic built-in-self-test (BIST) for
in-system test and also with registertransfer level (RTL) insertion of designfor-test (DFT) to help with functional
verification and safety. Additionally, it's

Marvin Test
Solutions' GENASYS
Semi TS-960 Series.

becoming much more Important
for DFT insertion to be tightly
integrated with synthesis/place and route,
otherwise you are sacrificing too much design power,
performance and area, or automatic
test pattern generation (ATPG) quality
of results (QoR)-test coverage, test time/
cost-with an RTL-only approach."
Judy Davies, vice president of global marketing communications at Advantest:
"The most significant change to come
along in decades is the imminent deployment of 5G technology, which will see
widespread use in not only next-generation smart phones, but also the Internet
of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence
(AI). With the advent of 5G and 5G-NR
communication ICs, test equipment is
being asked to support advanced devices
that operate at mmWave frequencies to

Advantest's
T2000 GPWGD module.

achieve faster transmission speeds, higher
bandwidths, higher density connections,
and ultra-low latency."
Sausan Arebi, technical writer and
Brandon Malatest, chief operating officer
at Per Vices: "There has been a large shift
toward testing using ATE. This equipment
plays a vital role in maintaining the quality and integrity of semiconductor components, as well as handling their new and
upcoming transformations and the associated growing complexity of silicon chips.
JULY 2019 EVALUATIONENGINEERING.COM

11
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