Semiconductor Testing

Interesting video on testing ICs by Asianometry:

source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXULADjnO5s

I think Asianometry is a "one man band" so there are bound to be some mistakes in there.  For example (a nit pick) it was Takeda Riken not Takeda Rikan :)

  Also Allen-Bradley made carbon composition resistors but he showed a picture of what appeared to be a film resistor on ceramic (with the spiral pattern).

  Also not sure on his diode diagrams (they look backwards to me :)

And I was told it was pronounced: Shlum-ber-jay:

Fairchild is easier to pronounce than Favre or Schlumberger :)

  Anyway nothing wrong of huge importance.
 

This video is a good history of how IC testing changed over the years and which IC test companies made it into the 21st century.  

Personally I worked on the Fairchild IC testers but we used Teradyne testers at GTE, too, especially for linear.  About the only thing I knew about Teradyne was that they called their test equipment cabinets: kiosks - I'd never heard that term before :)

One thing I've wondered about was whether Iddq testing ever caught on - I suspect not.  The idea there was to have test patterns that would toggle nodes up and down but then look for changes in the device power supply current (Iddq should be darn close to zero for a "good" CMOS chip).  The trouble is that it takes time to make those kinds of analog measurements of current.  But you'd probably need scan to load the patterns for this anyway and it is much quicker to do functional testing at 100 MHz.


Best Regards,
Chuck, WB9KZY
http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm