The Role Of Testing In Semiconductor Design And Manufacturing

Accurate and stable testing and measurement is a critical aspect in all the stages of semiconductor manufacturing, in order to ensure accuracy and stability of the product.

- Sneha Ambastha

Today, with a number of design and fabrication companies involved in semiconductor (semicon) manufacturing, the perpart recurring costs have become a very important issue. The industry aims to bring these down by reducing the cost of testing the semicons, either at the design or the manufacturing stage. These costs largely depend upon the time taken for testing and verification. As per a report by McKinsey, the overall time involved in test and verification of semicons during their design phase has increased by 50 per cent over the past few years. This means that introducing any new product and subsequently ramping up production will take about 12 to 18 months of debugging.

Recent challenges

Semiconductor manufacturing involves a lot of challenges, due to the increasing use of millimetre wave propagation in cellular networks. The test engineers need high measuring frequencies in order to develop accurate models with a high throughput. However, the challenge is that the fabless semiconductor companies require accurate and stable measurements over an extended period of time. They can achieve this only through extensive testing on wafer devices. Thankfully, test engineers have more tools at hand today, particularly for making accurate measurements.