How The Semiconductor Ecosystem Is Responding To Its Global Challenges


The semiconductor industry is changing rapidly, with government support for re-shoring capacity creating new interplay among resources in Asia, the U.S., and Europe—even as the industry develops and sustains new technologies like HBM and heterogeneous integration. Geopolitical factors such as the CHIPS (Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors for America) Act, the scarcity of s... » read more

Challenges And Outlook Of ATE Testing For 2nm SoCs


The transition to the 2nm technology node introduces unprecedented challenges in Automated Test Equipment (ATE) bring-up and manufacturability. As semiconductor devices scale down, the complexity of testing and ensuring manufacturability increases exponentially. 3nm silicon is a mastered art now, with yields hitting pretty high for even complex packaged silicon, while the transition from 3nm to... » read more

Battery Management Testing: Alleviating EV Buyer Anxiety


As the electric vehicle (EV) market surges towards 2040, fueled by strong consumer enthusiasm, the need to address key concerns about EV range, reliability, and battery life has become critical. Anxiety over potential range limitations, amplified by fears of scarce charging options, alongside safety worries due to media-reported battery incidents, have slowed adoption rates. Here, the semicondu... » read more

Scan Pattern Portability From PSV To ATE To SLT To IST


By Ash Patel and Karthik Natarajan Chip testing has become increasingly complex due to the number of variables impacting designs – from design size and complexity, to high transistor counts on advanced technology nodes, to 2.5D/3D packaging, to manufacturing variability. All of these combine to make testing today's chips and packages more complicated than ever before. The number of test pa... » read more

GaN 8Gbps High-Speed Relay MMIC For Automated Test Equipment


An 8 Gbps high-speed relay MMIC for an Automated Test Equipment (ATE) using a gallium nitride is developed and evaluated. Metal-Insulator-Semiconductor structure with a tantalum oxynitride is employed to reduce a leakage current for ATE applications. The fabricated MMIC shows 0.3 nA of the leakage current, 12 GHz of a -3 dB bandwidth, and excellent eye-opening of 8 Gbps signals with a 18-lead... » read more

Over-The-Air (OTA) Test Socket And Handler Integration Technology For 5G Mass Production Testing


This paper presents the integration of socket, measurement antenna and handler for over-the-air (OTA) testing of antenna-in-package (AiP) devices using automated test equipment (ATE) for 5G applications. The design and characteristics of sockets for performing OTA testing in the radiating near field are also discussed. The paper also describes the structure of OTA handler integration using thes... » read more

High-Speed Image Processing By GPU


By using CPU and GPU together, we have increased the speed of the filter function that is often used in imaging tests. This feature is provided by the Image Processing Library (IPL) in T2000 CMOS Image Sensor Solution. Next IPE, our new image processing engine that is currently in development, is about six times faster than IPE3 (Image Processing Engine 3), an existing engine. Author: Chiezo... » read more

Development Of High Voltage General-Purpose Pin-Electronics


Currently, there is a demand in Automated Test Equipment (ATE) to test both high-speed/low-voltage amplitude devices manufactured in advanced processes and low-speed / high-voltage amplitude devices manufactured in legacy processes by a pin-electronics equipment. However, it is difficult to achieve both the operating speed over than 1Gbps and the wide I/O range over than 10Vpp, due to the trade... » read more

Testing AiP Modules In High-Volume Production


Far-field and radiating near-field are two options for high-volume over-the-air (OTA) testing of antenna-in-package (AiP) modules with automated test equipment (ATE) [1]. In this article, we define an AiP device under test (DUT) and examine the measurement results from both methods. Creating an AiP evaluation vehicle Proper evaluation of an ATE OTA measurement setup requires an AiP module. Us... » read more

Metrology at Automated Test Equipment Manufacturers


New technologies require an efficient qualification infrastructure to determine and qualify technical specifications. Metrology is the science which determines the acknowledged specification setting process based on proven international standards. This paper describes metrology and its role and benefits in automated test equipment business. By Piotr Skwierawski and Ralf Haefner. Click her... » read more

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