Product category:
Test Accessories
News Release from: Antares Advanced Test Technologies | Subject: ISocket
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 21 February 2008
Thermal management makes burn-in more
accurate
Intelligent socket integrates heater, heatsink and thermal sensor, which calculates the precise amount of heat, or cooling, needed to maintain a device at a programmed temperature.
Antares iSocket thermal-management technology has been used at an IC test lab in Silicon Valley to allow semiconductor engineers in the region to conduct off-site qualification burn-in of 50W devices and below with individual DUT-level temperature controls "Chipmakers and fabless companies are generally unable to deliver accurate burn-in data to customers when devices that experience varied thermal dissipation and power fluctuations - due largely to shrinking wafer-fab architecture and related current leakage - are qualified in a burn-in chamber with variable ambient temperatures", says Chris Lopez, Antares' Manager of Thermal Solutions
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 18 May 2006 at 8.00am (UK)
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"When you've got really dense burn-in boards populated with devices drawing different amounts of current and you put those devices in a chamber environment, you're basically never going to know the exact temperature of any one device", says Lopez.
"You won't be able to accurately identify or explain failure data".
The test lab's upgraded burn-in chamber is intended to give chip providers the ability to cost-efficiently conduct DUT-level qualification burn-in at high volumes without making major capital investments or employing staff to manage the qualification and product binning.
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The test lab put the upgraded chamber online after using it to qualify a set of devices for a fabless ASIC provider and its Fortune 100 client.
The burn-in chamber at the lab is configured to qualify up to 1536 devices at up to 150C.
The chamber is outfitted with 48 control slots to receive Antares' iSocket Racks - with each one carrying up to 32 iSocket thermal-management assemblies.
Each iSocket, or intelligent socket, includes an integrated heater, heatsink and thermal sensor, which calculates the precise amount of heat, or cooling, needed to maintain a device at a programmed temperature.
"For certain orders with tight burn-in standards, you're just not going to get reliable failure data without some sort of local temperature controls", says Lopez.
"And when you talk about qualifying a device and start looking at cost and time to market, binning really isn't an option, so you look elsewhere".
Antares upgraded the test lab's chamber by essentially installing power supplies to run onboard logic and onboard heaters and connections to the PC that manages the chamber.
"We're using the chamber's drivers and their tester to run the test program and get to thermally controlled device-level burn-in as nonintrusively as possible", says Lopez.
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