A novel design for hardware interface board with reduced resource utilization

The final cost of an integrated circuit (IC) is proportional to its testing time. One of the main goals of test engineers when building an IC test solution is to reduce test time. Reduction of Test time is achieved by multi-site testing where multiple ICs are tested simultaneously using automated test equipment (ATE). During multi-site testing, if a certain test requires abundant resources, it is accomplished by testing one set of ICs at a time while the other ICs remain idle, thus lengthening the total test time. In digital-analog hybrid ICs, both analog and digital tests need to be performed, increasing the tester resource requirement and causing digital resource shortage. This paper describes a hardware interface board (HIB) design for a test case of a digital-analog IC on Teradyne’s ETS-364 ATE. The HIB's design allows the ATE to perform multi-site I²C based tests, which usually require lot of tester resources, utilizing only two digital resources and one measurement resource. This design achieves halving the I2C test time while lowering the number of resources necessary for multi-site testing compared to set-by-set testing. The proposed work has achieved up to 90.625% of resource reduction for multisite testing for a single test.

AMUET Digital 4.0 IOT Platform for Naval Electrical Installations

Modern ships are designed around complex and sophisticated electronic systems, highly dependent on electrical power, all interconnected with a large array of electrical wiring that were designed with CAD systems. Until now, the manufacturing, installation and testing had been performed with conventional tools and handheld meters, requiring thousands of manhours and multiple reworks. The author presents a new generation handheld-size wireless automated test equipment that are now integrating Industry 4.0 processes to support the design, manufacturing, installation, testing and sustainment of the complex electrical sub-systems associated with ships functional and mission systems.

Assessment of Health Monitoring Trustworthiness of Avionics Systems

The article provides a methodology for assessing the trustworthiness of health monitoring the dismounted avionics systems with automated test equipment (ATE). The indicators include the probabilities of false-positive, false-negative, true-positive, and true-negative. For the first time, we introduced into consideration the instability of the source of stimulus signal (SSS), the random and systematic component of the measuring channel error, and the reliability characteristics of the systems themselves. We consider a specific case of an exponential distribution of permanent failures and intermittent faults and derive formulas for calculating the trustworthiness indicators. Numerical calculations illustrate how the probabilities of correct and incorrect decisions depend on accuracy parameters. We show that the probabilities of false-positive and false-negative increase much faster than the probabilities of true-positive and true-negative decrease when the standard deviation of stimulus signal increases. For a Very High-Frequency Omni-Directional Range (VOR) receiver, we demonstrate that even with a zero random error generated by the source of the stimulus signal, the probabilities of false-positive and false-negative are different from zero.

Development of an Automatic Contactless Thermometer Alert System Based on GPS and Population Density

In today's out-breaking Covid-19 circumstance, treatments are preferred to be contactless. Social distancing has become a mandate in order to prevent disease spreading. In such a scenario, checking the body temperature is preferable to be made contactless because it helps the doctors and social workers to stay away from the symptomatic patients. Infrared (IR) contactless thermometers are employed in measuring the temperature while preventing direct contact with the body. Improved functionalities in the contactless thermometer can provide accurate precision in measurements and calculations. Technological advancement in pharmacy has cohesively improved over time. Coupling Machine Learning (CML) will revolutionize the process of testing. The demand for automated temperature test equipment is likely to grow at a significant pace, with the continuous advancements in technology and the adoption of ATE (Automated Test Equipment). The Global Positioning System (GPS) easy tracking and navigation can be used for easy tracking. Population density can be used to calculate the amount of population in a particular area. The proposed automatic contact-less thermometer system has the potential to replace the traditional temperature measuring techniques and safeguard from human-to-human transmission diseases.

Dynamic Photon Emission on FinFET Devices Through Novel Scan Test Approaches

Dynamic Photon Emission Microscopy (D-PEM) is an established technique for isolating short and open failures, where photons emitted by transistors are collected by sensitive infra-red detectors while the device under test is electrically exercised with automated test equipment (ATE). Common tests, such as scan, use patterns that are generated through Automatic Test Pattern Generator (ATPG) in compressed mode. When these patterns are looped for D-PEM, it results in indeterministic states within cells during the load or unload sequences, making interpretation of emission challenging. Moreover, photons are emitted with lower probability and lesser energies for smaller technology nodes such as the FinFET. In this paper, we will discuss executing scan tests in manners that can be used to bring out emission which did not show up in conventional test loops.