Future of testing: Reintegration of design, testing and manufacturing

For at least last 20 years dkroelectronics has been evolving rapidly tracking - almost without a single deviation - Moore's Law. At the beginning of nineteen nineties some level of concern was expressed whether continuing along Moore’s prediction makes economic sense. As a response to the above and other concerns in 1993 and 1994 the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) has proposed “The National Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors.” This Roadmap (which is also referred to as the “SIA Roadmap”) proposes a number of milestones to be achieved by the semiconductor industry in next 15 years [3]. The true objective of the SIA Roadmap seems to be, however, a consolidation of the vision of what should be the future of the entire semiconductor industry. Such a consolidation has been perhaps seen as a necessary step in focusing industry government and universities on the same technology development objectives. Unification of the objectives could be the most effective way to build momentum which could allow the equipment industry to meet all the challenges of subsequent submicron technologies. Hence, one can see the SIA Roadmap as a "self-fulfilling prophecy" which facilitates continuation of the evolution of semiconductor industry along the Moore's Law. It should also be seen as an agenda focused on achieving ever smaller transistor sizes with ever more complex and, unfortunately, ever more expensive manufacturing processes. There are a number of very important implications of both the ambitious goals of the SIA Roadmap and the way these goals have been established. The most important of them are derivatives of a timely decrease-of-transistor-feature-size as primary goal of the Roadmap and strong focus on equipment-for-smaller-transistor related issues. Consequences of these two Roadmap’s characteristics will have a strong impact on manufacturing, testing and design. This summary discusses some of them in more detail.