Consistent testing plays a crucial role in the development and production of integrated circuits, providing valuable feedback on both circuit design and manufacturing quality. Especially critical during early stages like wafer-level testing. Since commercial test equipment is often prohibitively expensive, we set out to develop a custom test system tailored to a specific family of integrated circuits.
The thesis begins with testing motivation and overview of the fundamental approaches used, followed by a description of the device under test and its intended purpose, along with key testing requirements for the production environment. The thesis core focuses on the test device development and all accompanying software, designed to perform production-level tests at the wafer stage.
Thanks to its modular design and hierarchical software architecture, the test device supports both wafer-level and packaged chip testing. Together with a calibrated test device, a wafer positioner, and a computer application for automated testing, a complete test system was developed, tailored to the target integrated circuits family. The thesis also addresses the importance of statistical data analysis and test time optimization. As an additional contribution, the procedure and relevance of selected qualification tests are briefly presented.
The outcome of the project, part of which is this thesis, is a fully functional, cost-effective test system that is expected
to support testing of several tens of thousands of integrated circuits annually.
|
