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Dear Colleague
We are very pleased to announce that Teradyne has invited Pintail to become their strategic software partner in Adaptive Test. Teradyne becomes the first ATE leader to recognize the growing importance of adaptive test methods and in doing so, expands their ability to offer their customers a more complete test management solution. |
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Interview with Roy Chorev, Teradyne's Software Marketing Manager and a veteran of the test industry for eight years.
What is Teradyne's goal in partnering with S/W vendors?
As a leader in the test industry, we want to be able to provide our customers with a full range of solutions to meet their test challenges. Yield, test time, zero defects and productivity are important issues to our customers. By working with software innovators like Pintail, we expand our abilities to maximize our customer's return on investment in Teradyne platforms.
Why did you choose Pintail?
Pintail has established a great reputation with blue chip semiconductor vendors like Qualcomm and Texas Instruments. They have experience in applying adaptive test techniques to volume production and have the largest installed base of such systems. Key factors to us included: (1) how effective their solutions have proven to be to real users, (2) how easy the solutions are to deploy and own, and (3) the breadth of support across worldwide test subcontractors.
Why doesn't Teradyne offer these S/W solutions directly?
As with any software tools, users recognize that there is an investment in qualifying and deploying the methodologies. Therefore, it is important that the tools be available on any hardware platforms they might choose in the future. Third party software vendors like Pintail are best positioned to fulfill this market need.
Does this mean that Pintail software will work without any changes to standard Teradyne platforms?
Yes. Pintail developed their products without any changes to Teradyne hardware of software. Our entire line of IG-XL testers is supported as well as older IMAGE-based systems.
How will Teradyne collaborate with Pintail?
Teradyne's worldwide field organization will be trained to identify customer requirements where Pintail solutions can help. Our applications engineers will be trained over time to assist customer in deploying Pintail solutions. This may involve consulting, data analysis, test program instrumentation, etc. Teradyne is also actively promoting open standards via working groups with several software vendors to insure future data and program compatibility.
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 An Important Industry Milestone |
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Teradyne's strategic partnership with Pintail for adaptive test software represents an important milestone in the test industry. Five years ago, when Pintail launched its first software products, many predicted that the following obstacles would block our success:
Portability: It would be impossible to develop software technology that would be portable across multiple ATE platforms due to lack of standard interfaces and lack of support from the ATE vendors.
Subcon Support: Test subcontractors, who were obviously taking on more and more of the world's testing requirements, would not allow such software to be installed in their environments.
Cultural inertia: Test and product engineers who were raised in a culture of 100% testing, would not trust third party software that used statistical analysis on the fly to modify the results of testing for the benefit of improving reliability or reducing test time.
Teradyne is the first tester vendor to recognize the growing and positive role that such adaptive testing techniques are having for their customers. Furthermore, their program for partnering with qualified third party software vendors will help stimulate additional software innovation and collaboration in the future.
Pintail applauds the vision and leadership being demonstrated by Teradyne in adopting a total solution approach to meeting their customers' testing requirements. |
 Can DPPM & Test Time be reduced at the same time with Adaptive Test? |
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Readers familiar with the automotive IC market are aware of the stringent reliability goals imposed those products. Zero defects is the requirement! Outlier detection methods have been successfully used over the past several years to significantly improve chip reliability by rejecting parts that are within spec but performing differently from the majority of parts in a lot.
Outlier detection can create some yield loss that is not desired in commercial market segments. Conversely, many people believe that techniques to reduce test time cannot coexist with high reliability requirements since reducing test time implies some reduction in test coverage. Neither of these positions are always true.
Pintail can show you techniques that will improve reliability and reduce test time on the same devices using dynamic testing techniques. The principal is fairly intuitive. By identifying outliers in early parametric test results, correlations can predict subsequent tests that have a high probability of failing. These subsequent tests could be parametric tests or functional patterns with excessive test times. By predicting device failure modes from early outlier detection, both reliability and throughput can be improved by failing the part earlier in the test program.
Contact us if you'd like to explore how Pintail delivers these benefits.
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Please forward this newsletter to anyone in your organization interested in learning more about on-line Adaptive Test, yield improvement, real-time monitoring or real-time data analysis. Also, drop me a note if you have recommendations for future topics of interest to you.
Sincerely,
Taylor Scanlon
Pintail Technologies |
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