Trends in manufacturing test methods and their implications

Driven by market applications in the areas of computing, networking, storage, optical, wireless, portable, and consumer electronics, semiconductor chips today are as diverse as ever. Confluence of multiple applications and rapid integration has also driven the heterogeneity of chips. Test methods have evolved with the products. However, the basic goals in testing remain the same: quality of product, recurring and non-recurring costs and time to market. In this paper we try to catalog some commonly used test methods, identify their associated DFT requirements and trends in terms of tester requirements. Given the diversity of semiconductors chips today such as various PLDs, volatile and non-volatile memories, analog, mixed signal, FPGA, ASIC, SOC, MEMs and processors, it is impossible for a paper of this nature to be fully comprehensive. So we limit our focus on processor, ASIC and SOCs.