Highly Parallel Wafer-Level-Reliability Systems with Modular SMUs

摘要

Reliability testing has long served as a method of ensuring that semiconductor devices maintain their desired performance over a given lifetime. As IC manufacturers continue to introduce new and innovative processes with decreasing device geometries, they need to ensure that the additional complexity from these changes doesn't affect the long-term reliability of their ICs. In addition, major technology trends in autonomous driving, cloud-based data storage, and life sciences are forcing IC suppliers to provide higher assurances of product reliability to their customers who work on mission-critical applications. These two trends are driving semiconductor manufacturers to vastly increase the amount of reliability data they collect and analyze while decreasing the cost of test. When faced with this problem of more data at a lower cost, many reliability engineers find they cannot solve it using traditional reliability solutions. As a result, they're turning toward modular, flexible solutions that can scale to fit their needs (Fig. 1).