Getting the Most Out of ATE Test Seconds in the Chiplet Age

By Ira Leventhal,  Advantest 
EETimes (March 27, 2024)

In the 2023 movie BlackBerry, the head of AT&T Cingular explains to the BlackBerry CEO about Cingular’s strategy to sell data plans with the newly introduced Apple iPhone: “Do you know what the problem with selling minutes is? There’s only one minute in a minute.” As someone working for a company selling “test seconds” for semiconductor devices, this got me thinking that there’s only one test second in a second. And while our customers may accept some additional test seconds to get a device to market quickly, those seconds need to settle back down to typical levels once devices ramp to high volume—or else those additional test seconds are coming right out of our customer’s bottom line. 

Rapidly increasing design complexity, heterogenous integration packaging, and greater adoption of system-level test insertions are all drivers for increasing test seconds, yet there is no secret stash of money available to fund this increase. So, the challenge is, how can we provide more than one test second’s worth of value in a single second? 

To read the full article, click here