TATTL: the automated thermal test lab

The development of the automated thermal test lab (TATTL) at Advanced Micro Devices originated in the need to improve the efficiency and resource utilization for the thermal characterization services provided by the Materials Research Laboratory. TATTL is a set of Fortran-77 real-time data acquisition and control modules which integrate the variety of instrumentation required for the performance of device calibration and junction-to-case thermal resistance, natural-convection, and forced-convection testing. The TATTL modules provided a complete environment within which thermal testing is performed and they are built on a central database unifying the information needed during testing and subsequent reporting of results. The architecture of the TATTL system and the hardware and software used in this implementation are described. Communication with instrumentation, operation in a real-time environment, and structuring of data for efficient transfer and report generation are discussed. The software runs on a DEC QBUS system, but in this discussion, emphasis is placed on the system structure rather than the details of coding