Towards a standardized procedure for automatic test equipment timing accuracy evaluation

Because of the lack of consistency in automatic test equipment (ATE) timing specifications, the usefulness of suppliers' specification sheets are very limited. SEMATECH has proposed an ATE Specification Standard to unify the definitions of ATE specifications and verification procedures. We present the effectiveness and limitations of this standard based on our ATE evaluation practice. Three additional tests are added beyond the SEMATECH scope to address some significant timing errors related to output compare. This includes termination dependent delay error, receiver bandwidth limit, and compare output jitter. We will demonstrate that these errors are significant parts of the overall timing accuracy (OTA). This work is an effort toward a common timing validation criteria.