May 30 2014
Aehr Test Systems, a worldwide supplier of semiconductor test and burn-in equipment, today announced it has shipped ABTS Burn-in and Test Systems to two new customers in China, one to a Chinese semiconductor foundry to fill a previously announced order and the other to a Chinese government research institute.
"China is a rapidly growing market for semiconductor manufacturing and we are pleased to ship our systems to these customers in the region," said Mark Allison, vice president of sales at Aehr Test Systems. "Increased reliability and quality needs for automotive and mobility devices are driving new requirements in the test and burn-in market, and the state-of-the-art systems we provide are designed to fill these requirements both today and for the foreseeable future, and at a compelling price."
According to industry research firm TechNavio, the semiconductor market in China is forecast to grow at a CAGR of 24.4% over the period 2012-2016. The firm notes that one of the key factors contributing to this market growth is the globally increasing demand for smartphones and tablets, and their data also show that the semiconductor market in China has been witnessing large capital expenditures by global companies to set up a semiconductor manufacturing base in China.
Mr. Allison continued, "As part of this shipment, one of these systems also includes the capability to perform a low-temperature operating life (LTOL) test, in which the devices are subjected to temperatures as low as -40C for an extended period. 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 higher-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.