25th Anniversary Panel Session: Past, Present and Future of ATS

We are celebrating the 25th anniversary of ATS this year. Looking back the history of test research, obviously ATS has been an important part of it. Education wise, it also plays an important role, as we can see that the symposium rotates in different Asian cities where the semiconductor industry gains momentum and grows with ATS. The industry needs badly high-quality IC design, DFT, and test engineers, and professors bring students to ATS to get them ready for solving challenging issues that they will face immediately upon receiving their graduate degree. Can ATS serve the community in a similar way in the future? There have been some panel sessions organized in the past 24 years for ATS, but most of them were dedicated to specific technical issues. This time, we are going to discuss how ATS will survive another 25 years. Or even more seriously, can it survive at all? To encourage the audience to join our discussion, we will give position statements on the past, present, and future of ATS. That is, we will review the past, which young attendees might not be familiar with. We will summarize the impact of ATS in different places in this region of the semiconductor world. We will analyze our position at the present time, and give visions of the future. We have observed the dramatic semiconductor market and industry shift in the past two decades, so it may be time for us to reposition ATS now.