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Introduction – The Bumpy Road From the Lab to the Fab
Design engineers are a world apart from test engineers, and the consequences of this
open loop become especially evident when production tests fail on silicon and debug
cannot tell why. Such failures often lead to blamestorming, wasting valuable resources
as the different teams blame each other while the root cause of the failures is not
easily traceable.
Design engineers work with Electronic Design Automation (EDA) environments and
testing methods while production test engineers have their own tools and
methodologies. This gap often leads to a bumpy road from the lab to the fab and can
result in customer returns, longer time to market (TTM), higher cost, and lower yield.
Why Test Program Validation by EDA Is Not Enough
EDA tools provide convenient abstractions for designers and as such, they might
overlook some production-related considerations. Specifically, EDA environments
often ignore the hardware limitations of the Automated Test Equipment (ATE) used
for production testing, and are also unaware of the pattern conversion to ATE format.
As a result, when tests pass on EDA but fail on ATE it could be quite challenging to
pinpoint why it happens. Is there a fault with the design test? Is it a pattern conversion
issue? Or perhaps it is a manufacturing problem? Investigating each one of those
potential causes might even require different expertise.
Using only EDA for test program validation makes it hard to tell why tests fail on ATE
TestInsight
Early Test Program Validation Using a Virtual ATE
Dima Angert, Software Architect, TestInsight
White Paper
Design engineers are a world
apart from test engineers,
and this open loop makes
production test issues
snowball into customer
returns, longer TTM, higher
cost, and lower yield.
Test program validation by
EDA is not enough as it does
not take into consideration
the actual ATE environment
used for production testing.
T
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