Back-end Design Tools (Physical Design):Product Engineering Tools

Product Engineering Tools

Larry:

A good question. A product engineer is the intermediary between design and manufacturing. The product engineer usually guides the first silicon through manufacturing, using EDA tools.

Diagnostic tests are run if no chips work on the wafer, or not in the package. The product engineer performs these tests to find the source of chip failures. The source may be the design, the tests, or the process.

Various isolation tests and probe tools help with the diagnostic effort. Microscopic analysis with an electron beam microscope may be used. Finding and fixing errors at this phase can be a long, laborious, and costly procedure. Design, test, or process fixes are then made. All the verification and checking tools are rerun, and new mask or masks made.

These re-spins (re-do's) of silicon are unfortunately common. Great effort is made to achieve first silicon success, because the alternative is so expensive. Re-spin iterations may cause projects to run out of time or money before achieving success. So some projects use FPGAs for the final product, or use them to prove out a design before implementing it as a denser, faster silicon ASIC.

An in-system test runs the IC with the system (or EDA test bench) in which it must work. The ICs are characterized (how fast they run, over what voltage range, and so forth) using EDA tools.

After characterization, a long series of burn-in tests is done. The IC is operated at high power and temperature. This accelerates any sort of wear-out or early (infant mortality) failures. These tests add a measure of reliability to the production use of the design. A few EDA tools model semiconductor aging to help predict device reliability.

Nora:

I guess waiting for first silicon must be a tense time.

Larry:

Yes, it's pretty tense. A lot of these ICs have a short product life. Process improvements come about every 18 months or so. So there's a lot of pressure to move a design on to a faster process.

Nora:

You mean they have to do it all over again?

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