Advantest wins order from IC maker HiSilicon
Advantest Corporation has received an order from the engineering group within HiSilicon Technologies, a Chinese producer of application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and other chipsets for communication networks and digital media.
This is for a V93000 Smart Scale tester equipped with Advantest's Pin Scale Serial Link (PSSL) digital channel card.
Introduced in the fourth quarter of 2013, the PSSL card is already in use at more than ten customer sites for both device characterisation and volume manufacturing of high-speed semiconductors.
"Advantest's test solution presents both the performance capabilities and the low cost of test that we require," says David Lin, senior test manager with HiSilicon. "While we are installing a PSSL-enabled tester in our engineering operations, our OSAT (outsourced semiconductor assembly and test) partners are using several of these systems for high-volume testing of our commercially available ICs."
Operating at data-transfer rates up to 16 Gbps, PSSL is claimed to be one of the fastest fully integrated automatic test equipment instruments on the market.
It is the newest of Advantest's Pin Scale cards built on the V93000 Smart Scale's universal pin architecture, making it capable of performing per-pin testing with high multi-site efficiency.
Each pin on a PSSL card can run at its own data rate, allowing a tester to match the exact clock speeds of any device under test without sacrificing pin count or timing flexibility. This design enables the system to achieve good granularity in IC testing.
Because all resources can operate independently and simultaneously, PSSL is capable of high-volume throughput.
The system can conduct at-speed testing of high-end ICs used in infrastructure and network processing applications including 10G/40G/100G Ethernet, PCI Express (PCIe) interface and proprietary 10G to 16G backplane SerDes technology, which is used in China's LTE communications infrastructure.
PSSL also supports physical layer testing methodologies such as pseudorandom bit stream stimulus and response, jitter injection and measurement capability as well as AC and DC analysis to provide comprehensive margin test coverage.
Established in 2004, HiSilicon Technologies is a provider of end-to-end chipsets and solutions for telecommunication networks, wireless terminals and digital media. With IC design divisions in Beijing, Shanghai, the U.S. and Sweden.
