Remote Education Experience on Learning IC Characterization/Production Test

Abstract

Electronics manufacturers are driven to produce new integrated circuits (IC’s) with higher quality in shorter production cycles (the well known time-to-market concept). In parallel, with the advent of submicron technologies digital circuits become more complex, with an increasing transistor-per-pin ratio making them hard-to-test without Design-For-Test (DFT) and Built-in Self-Test (BIST) facilities [1]. Also, during the past decade the production of mixed analog-digital IC’s have been dramatically developed due to the explosive growth of the multimedia and telecom markets and testing for quality assurance has proven to approach 50% of the manufacturing costs for some complex mixed-signal IC’s [2].