An approach for addressing challenges and quality robustness in test engineering for semiconductor manufacture

Abstract

Electronic devices have become a vital everyday part of and influence in modern life. Following Moore’s law and subsequent “More than Moore” approaches, semiconductor technologies are rapidly evolving - accompanied by new assembly and packaging methods that enable exponential growth in functionality within a packaged device. Within the integrated circuits (IC) semiconductor industrial production process, testing each manufactured device is a major factor in determining the outgoing quality and reliability. For this purpose, automated testing equipment controlled by dedicated test programs developed within the test engineering discipline is used.

Test program development and associated quality issues are commonly identified in problems industry surveys. Thus, the author has undertaken an initiative addressing these challenges resulting in a novel proposal, namely: “adopting software engineering methods and software test techniques to the test program development process”. The methods developed and solutions implemented by the author where disseminated to the experienced test engineering community, to assess their usage benefits. The standardised frameworks created, in combination with a layeredtesting concept, support a sustainable application of this innovative approach to industrial practice.

Data compiled from industry projects provided evidence that the proposed methodology is effective for producing the required test programs. The test program development timeline is significantly ameliorated, showing a possible effort reduction up to half in the man-weeks required. Test quality and related semiconductor reliability improvements were evidenced within an industry case study. Normalized lifetime data for new products using the quality framework developed in this work were applied to both hardware and software and revealed a reduction by a factor of ten in occurrence of reliability incidents when compared to those products following traditional approaches.

Taken together the methodologies and solutions presented here provide powerful techniques for the test engineering discipline and have an important role in meeting new challenges. Furthermore, they provide a basis for improvements in standardisation and therefore may proliferate to other industries

Date of Award	May 2015
Original language	English
Supervisor	Omar Escalona (Supervisor) & Colin Turner (Supervisor)