Sep 27 2013
Aehr Test Systems, a worldwide supplier of semiconductor test and burn-in equipment, today announced it has received an order for an ABTS Burn-in and Test System from a Chinese semiconductor foundry. The order includes a down payment for this specialized hot/cold configuration. Shipment is expected before the end of Aehr Test's third quarter of fiscal 2014.
"We are pleased to receive this order from a new customer in China," said Mark Allison, vice president of sales at Aehr Test Systems. "This order from a semiconductor foundry shows how increased reliability and quality needs for automotive and mobility devices are driving new requirements in the test and burn-in market. Our selection was based on our ability to provide a state-of-the-art system to fill their needs both now and for the foreseeable future, and we were able to provide that to them at an attractive price."
The order is from a specialized semiconductor foundry with a strong focus on high quality services and advanced value-added technologies, including embedded nonvolatile memory, high voltage and low leakage processes. The ABTS system will be used in the qualification and on-going process monitoring of various types of memories, including Flash and SRAM. Qualification tests typically utilize a high-temperature operating life (HTOL) test, where failure mechanisms are accelerated by burning-in the devices for 1000 hours to confirm that the basic design and fabrication process of a device will meet the reliability targets over an extended period of normal use. On-going process monitoring involves selecting samples from production lots and burning them in at high or low temperature to ensure that the process continues to hit its reliability targets.
"In this case, the system will also perform a low-temperature operating life (LTOL) test, where the devices are subjected to temperatures as low as -40C for an extended period," Allison continued. "In addition to being a more rigorous screen for various failure mechanisms, LTOL is important for identifying failure modes for automotive applications, since automobiles are often subjected to extremely low temperatures."
The ABTS family of products is based on a new hardware and software platform that is designed to address not only today's devices, but also future devices for many years to come. It can test and burn-in both logic and memory devices, including resources for high pin-count devices and configurations for high-power and low-power applications. The ABTS system can be configured with up to 72 burn-in boards with up to 320 I/O channels each and 32M of test vector memory per channel. The ABTS offers the option of high voltage Device Power Supplies configurable with programmable voltage ranges to 60 or 230 volts, which are needed for automotive and power-line applications. The ABTS system is optimized for use with the Sensata iSocket* and VTR Thermal Management Technologies, which provide a scalable cost-effective solution using individual device temperature control for ICs up to 75 watts or more. Individual temperature control enables high-power devices with a broad range of power dissipation to be burned-in simultaneously in a single burn-in chamber while maintaining a precise device temperature. The ABTS system also uses N+1 redundancy technology and hot-swap capability for many key components in the system to maximize system uptime.
*iSocket is a trademark of Sensata Technologies, Inc.