TestProNews Q3/Q4 - 2008
VI Technology Designs IC Characterization Station to Reduce Test and Reporting Time on New IC Designs
A global leader in the design and manufacturing of embedded semiconductors for the automotive, consumer, industrial, networking, and wireless markets needed to improve the process of characterizing and generating reports for new integrated circuit (IC) designs. When characterizing new 8-bit to 32-bit microcontrollers, the OEM’s engineers often complained about the amount of time required to manually test the devices accurately, gather and consolidate the generated data, and create reports that span hundreds of pages. Testing new devices took several weeks or months, and summarizing the data could take just as long. It was not unusual for engineers to allocate hundreds of hours to test a new IC design and then spend just as many hours analyzing, correlating, and reporting on the data. These processes were taking valuable time away from the design process. The OEM decided to make recovering this time a priority with the goal of increasing device quality and reducing time to market.
Requirements
The OEM’s engineers needed to reduce the time spent testing and characterizing their designs— tasks necessary for finding faults with their designs—while still producing advanced analysis and reporting on device performance. In addition, they needed to fully characterize their designs to ensure their ICs were ready for release. The OEM also wanted flexibility in the types of equipment used for these tests while improving consistency, scalability, and reusability. The OEM hired VI Technology to design an automated bench-top system that would characterize IC designs efficiently and could be expanded to test new devices. The system also needed to significantly reduce the associated test and analysis time by consolidating massive amounts of test data in a centralized database, making it readily accessible to all team members.
Solution
VI Technology designed and developed an IC characterization station that automates manual test and characterization procedures. The IC characterization station provides the flexibility to add new hardware and measurement capabilities without modifying or changing the underlying architecture. The base system components are comprised of commercial, off the- shelf (COTS) hardware, including National Instruments PXI hardware, Tektronix oscilloscopes and function generators, and various other benchtop instruments. Using VI Technology’s enterprise test software, Arendar, the OEM’s engineers are able to analyze the test data and create reports within minutes instead of days.
Technical Details – IC Characterization Station Architecture
The core of the IC characterization station architecture is the software. The software architecture is designed to satisfy the following requirements:
- Provide a consistent and intuitive user interface,
enabling easy system configuration
- Adapt to any (COTS) instruments using GPIB,
USB, or Ethernet
- Reduce test, characterization, and device evaluation
time by managing and configuring test
routines and associated instruments
- Scale and easily accommodate the testing needs
of new device designs
- Store valuable test data in a secure, consistent,
and automatic manner
- Make test and characterization results available
through automatic report generation
The IC characterization station software provides all the necessary user interfaces and options for a test operator to configure, execute, and control the test system as well as monitor the performance of the device under test. The modular architecture of the software enables the system to be very flexible with regard to the different types of measurements and tests that are expected with complex devices. Depending on the available hardware, test engineers can use the system for IC characterization, validation, compliance, and even production testing.
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Instrument Panel of the IC Characterization Software |
VI Technology designed the IC characterization station as part of an enterprise test platform, which facilitates consistency across multiple test efforts, different departments, and the company as a whole. This approach enables test engineers to create, modify, and share new tests for new designs and archive these tests for future use. These features are useful when new or modified specifications surpass the capabilities of the existing system hardware. When new hardware is acquired, updating the software requires the modification of only the instrument abstraction layer rather than the core software components.
IC Characterization Station Instrument Layer
One of the main benefits of the IC characterization station is its flexibility to adapt to any COTS hardware equipped with a GPIB, USB, or Ethernet interface by means of an instrument layer designed by VI Technology. This instrument layer enables instrument abstraction, instrument interchangeability, and automatic recognition and initialization of devices. The instrument abstraction layer contains categories for different types of instruments with a well-defined set of specifications. If an instrument attached to the IC characterization station meets or exceeds the predefined specifications, that particular instrument can be classified as belonging to an instrument category. Available categories include equipment such as oscilloscopes, signal generators, and digital multimeters (DMMs).
In addition, the system includes high-level functions that map only to the required instrument function for device measurements. For example, if multimeters were used only to measure voltage and current, the multimeter instrument category would include functions for voltage and current measurement only. If in the future a capacitance measurement is required, the multimeter instrument category could be augmented to support capacitance measurements. This high-level function approach facilitates instrument interchangeability by not relying on instrument driver calls for a specific vendor’s equipment.
Arendar’s Test Data Management Capabilities
Another significant benefit of a highly automated test and characterization system is the data it produces. The ability to understand the device under test is only as good as the data acquired from the device, which can easily comprise millions of data samples, depending on the complexity of the device. It is for this reason that the OEM’s design and test engineers insisted that the IC characterization station include a way of managing and quickly sharing the test data and obtained results with the team members and throughout the organization. In particular, the OEM’s engineers requested a system that included the following:
- Centralized, commercial-grade database
- Easily modifiable database schema
- Minimal dependence on IT team or IT expertise
- Ability to mine the data through custom filters and basic data visualization
- Statistical Process Control (SPC) analysis capability
- Ability to import data from legacy files and formats
- Ability to export data for use in other software
- Ability to create report designs easily and automatically generate them based on the latest data
VI Technology Arendar is the only commercially available product that satisfied these requirements. Utilizing Arendar’s Test Data Management capabilities resulted in an efficient, cost-effective test system that required minimum configuration and customization as compared to a system built entirely from scratch.
Each IC characterization station is networked to a central server where Arendar safely and automatically stores test results in a Microsoft SQL Server database. Any number of test operators, design engineers, and managers can query the data through a Web browser. Using the built-in Arendar reporting capabilities, reports can be created automatically for five different devices based on a new IC design. The 170 hours previously required to generate a 100- page full-characterization report about a new IC design has been greatly reduced to less than one hour. Engineers have experienced similar gains in time for most characterization tests.
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The OEM's engineers were able to generate and publish custom reports all through a secure Web site. |
Arendar also includes an Administration Utility that enables users with no database or general IT experience to add new product definitions and perform test data management. Through the Arendar Web Dashboard, engineers now can access acquired data and corresponding reports from within the company or any location in real time and on demand with a Web browser, as long as they have appropriate user privileges.
Results
Features like the IC characterization station instrument layer and Arendar greatly reduce the time that the OEM’s test engineers need for test configuration and data analysis, particularly when validating new ICs. VI Technology created a system based on an instrument abstraction layer that allows for instrument interchangeability. Arendar was delivered as part of a complete, turn-key solution; and the OEM’s engineers have greatly benefited from the valuable time the solution has freed up. The OEM now has a comprehensive solution that turns large amounts of raw IC characterization data into meaningful, actionable information. By reducing reporting time by approximately 99%, the OEM’s engineers now can concentrate more on improving product performance and quality.
Benefits of the Enterprise Test Solution
The IC characterization station significantly reduced the time required to characterize new silicon. The time savings resulted from the gains in data throughput, high level of software and hardware integration, and communication efficiencies gained by that integration. Using proven technology, the IC characterization station automatically gathers the required measurements and provides instant and universal access to the data. VI Technology, over the scope of the project, created an enterprise test solution by combining automated test systems with enterprise technologies to solve company-wide problems. The combination of the new system and Arendar technology enabled engineers to correlate and analyze their raw data into meaningful information.
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