B a c kg r o u n d
Test & measurement
Semicon market screams for innovation in chip testing When testing their chips, semiconductor manufacturers have to find a balance between developing their own equipment and purchasing solutions. Those who lead the way are faced with difficult choices. Innovation is the message, as demonstrated by the Salland Engineering test symposium. René Raaijmakers
“I
’d like to challenge the vendors of automated test equipment who are here.” Peter Crabbe, director of operations at Austriamicrosystems (AMS) Sensor Belgium, took a provocative stance at a recent symposium for IC testing, organized by Salland Engineering in Zwolle. Crabbe told the test technology vendors present that AMS Sensor from Antwerp is still testing 80 percent of its image sensors with its own equipment. This is partly for historical reasons. Cmosis, incorporated by the Austrians in 2015 and now part of their sensor division, developed all its test systems itself. While many chip manufacturers are moving their testing activities to Asia, where they’re much cheaper to perform, AMS continues to test its image chips in Europe. “To a large extent, we do this to protect our knowledge,” says Crabbe. “Also, manufacturing a test system yourself is still significantly cheaper than buying one from an ATE supplier,” he confronted his audience, which consisted largely of manufacturers of test equipment. He challenged them to innovate more. But Crabbe does see the advantages of purchasing equipment. “Because of the way ATE manufacturers feed the information back, chip designers can learn a lot more.” Instruments made in-house usually
focus on only one thing, namely, to decide whether or not a chip is good. Commercial ATE testers, on the other hand, are heavy computers that extract large amounts of information from chips via their bonding pads. This allows for much more than just selecting between good and bad. Improving designs is an advantage, but with good
1.7 billion AI engine startup Graphcore plugs into Dutch test technology tests, it’s also possible to identify ‘secondchoice’ samples. It’s expected that the ATE industry will make great strides in the near future based on this data in combination with machine learning techniques and advanced algorithms. Crabbe, a former COO of Salland in Zwolle, at the end of his presentation: “When we buy test equipment, we always want to be able to fall back on instruments we’ve developed ourselves. After all, the imaging market is very innovation driven. We’re constantly pushing back frontiers
and we have no guarantees that we’ll be able to buy the necessary test technology off the shelf.” “You always have to make a careful consideration,” explains Paul van Ulsen, director of Salland Engineering and organizer of the test symposium. “Developing IC tests is simply quite expensive. However, some tests have to be developed by chip manufacturers themselves, because the market simply doesn’t offer anything yet.” Van Ulsen sees Crabbe’s comments mainly as a call to test suppliers to come up with new solutions more quickly. “That’s also why we’re organizing this symposium. To bring the whole chain together: from design to chip production to test instruments and their users.” With Salland Engineering, the Netherlands now has a good position in the testing world. Van Ulsen: “The fundamental testing technologies we develop are used by various chip manufacturers and ATE suppliers.” With state-of-the-art test hardware and software, the Zwolle-based company serves 95 percent of the global ATE manufacturers.
Biggest chip
It comes as no surprise that as the complexity of the components increases, the testing costs go up as well. Paul Elford of UK-based 2 21
