Microprocessor Chip Platform Test Systems And Optimization

Since its invention in 1958, the rapid growth of Integrated Circuit (IC) promotes the popularity of electronic products with the representative of computers, which improves the people's life tremendously. As the basis of integrated circuit, the size of semiconductor devices is becoming smaller and smaller as Moore's Law predicts, and approaching to its physical limit. As a result, semiconductor design, manufacturing process and backend test process are facing tough challenges.For some high value semiconductor chips, quality and reliability control is extremely important. In addition to the process control of whole manufacturing process, the manufacturer has to ensure high quality and reliability of the products delivered to customers through rigorous backend test process. For microprocessor products, backend test process mainly consists of functional test and platform validation. Functional test mainly test the capability of chips whether it can meet the designed specific requirements. While platform validation is to test the supporting system if it can boot up and operate properly under extreme application conditions with the microprocessor chip socketed in a simulated computer system that is used to closely simulate the end user environment. As the platform validation is normally designed for specific chips, different packaged products have to use different test motherboard and pedestal. Since platform validation uses many different hardware systems, their conversions for each different chip product are very time-consuming and thus cause the process to be the bottleneck of the whole production line.To solve this problem, this thesis aims to achieve the test hardware sharing among different products through the optimization of hardware system and process based on modeling design and experiment validation, from the learning and research of the hardware system in microprocessor platform validation with product platform validation practical experience. It enables certain type of products, instead of a specific product, to be tested with the same hardware environment. In this approach, the test platform conversion among different products can be realized simply by refreshing the software. It can save the time and frequency of hardware system changes, which may complete thousands more of unit testing. Meanwhile, it will also improve the product yield and test efficiency dramatically, reduce the manufacturing cost and bring more profits to the company.