Thoughts on Costs, Metrology and ATE

摘要

When dinosaurs wandered the earth and I covered the defense industry, there were concerns that, at the rate costs were climbing for aircraft avionics and counter-measures, the entire U.S. gross domestic product would be insufficient to pay for just one fighter by the year 2000. I was reminded of this at a SEMICON West press conference announcing the formation of the Semiconductor Test Consortium (STC). STC seeks to have the semiconductor test industry sign off on several ATE architectural attributes sought by Intel Corp. for the testing of logic chips, particularly system-on-a-chip (SoC), to keep platform costs down.