Enhancement Engineering

Reliability in semiconductor testing is not easy to achieve, especially if the circumstances are highly dynamic. Unfortunately the whole environment has steadily developed into this direction – and no end in sight.

Today semiconductor manufacturers must immediately react on changing volumes, tight forecast visibility and new market trends. This can only be achieved by the ability to quickly transfer existing test solutions to a new platform, increase site count and throughput, improve yield on process parameter changes, adopt new test concepts and realign test coverage.

Our engineers look back at an impressive lineup of successfully closed projects in this area. They have delivered critical test package conversions on all modern Teradyne™ tester platforms, and as key implementers in several benchmark projects they contributed to strategic decisions at semiconductor device specifiers and manufacturers. Many years of direct support responsibility for Teradyne™ platforms guarantees detailed understanding of tester architectures. This allows tailoring and optimizing test concepts for maximal stability and speed, and a holistic approach guarantees seamless integration into the complete solution.

Transferring a test package to a new tester platform usually requires significant engineering efforts. The temptation to convert line-by-line is undoubtedly there – it may be hard to understand all the conditions and details, sometimes not mentioned or explained in any accompanying documents outside the source code itself. In most cases the extra effort to reverse engineer the existing solution pays off – the result is a more detailed test specification, ideally cleared by debugging left-overs and workarounds for deficiencies in the previous platform. Only at this level it makes sense to re-implement the test solution by utilizing all the architectural benefits of the new platform.

» Why would a 1:1 converted test solution be better on a new tester if its superior features are not even used? «

Test time reduction, yield improvement and multi-site enhancements based on existing test solutions have similar requirements. We use sophisticated tools and statistical methods to measure the positive effect and to immediately detect possible negative implications in other areas. With our solid experience in the devices’ market segments we understand test coverage relationships and we can help identifying redundant areas as well as potentially missing aspects. Solid project planning and progress tracking allows us to internally align the optimal resources to the required tasks, regular status update reports maintain transparency in our execution.

Mindscale Consulting has an exceptional history in all relevant fields of enhancement engineering. Our engineers bring the spirit and enthusiasm to quickly adapt to new environments, understand possible conditions and constraints, develop optimized strategies, implement the solution and document the improvement.  This approach results in a straight-forward project execution, predictable results, maximum outcome and no surprises to the customer. Maybe a positive surprise every now and then …