Automating the tracking of electrical performance for memory test systems

This paper describes an automated tracking methodology for electrical performance of memory test systems. The electrical performance of interest is the edge placement of test signals. Test signal skews often affect the edge placement accuracy, which is critical in many devices testing. The traditional checkout is often performed manually via the use of a scope, which is tedious and the judgment as to whether the signal is within the specification and tolerance can be subjective. The research reported in this paper is to study, to evaluate and to come up with a test methodology for automating the tracking process of memory systems. A hardware module is designed to multiplex the memory device test signals and various components are selected to form up the hardware circuitry based on some design specifications and requirements. A computer program is also developed to interface the hardware to the test signals and to automate the signal testing process. The successful implementation proves that the proposed methodology can help to improve productivity and yield, in addition to the ease of troubleshooting such that signal integrity and tolerance of the memory test system can be checked out with minimum time and effort.