Advantest Enables PCIe Gen 5 NVMe & CXL Device Testing on Proven MPT3000 SSD Test Systems

Advantest announced that its MPT3000 solid-state drive (SSD) test systems are the industry’s first with the ability to test PCI Express fifth-generation (PCIe Gen 5) devices, including those utilizing the new Compute Express Link™ (CXL™) interconnect standard. To help drive product introduction, qualification, and volume production demands associated with PCIe Gen 5 NVMe & CXL devices, several leading memory device makers have purchased multiple MPT3000 products, including MPT3000ES engineering systems, MPT3000HVM high-volume manufacturing testers and device interface boards.

PCIe Gen 5 enables high-speed data transmission—essential for data centers, artificial intelligence (AI), and 5G applications. CXL is an open industry standard memory interconnect that builds on the physical and electrical interfaces of PCI Gen 5 to provide high-performance connections across memory types. 

Advantest designed its flexible MPT3000 systems to meet testing needs for enterprise and client SSDs, helping shorten customers’ time-to-market. In addition to CXL test, key MPT3000 capabilities include testing up to 32 Gbps, increased sideband and high-speed support, and improved temperature management for high-wattage drives.

“We are committed to driving memory and storage test innovation by developing the first systems and boards that will enable testing for both PCIe Gen 5 CXL and NVMe SSDs,” said Indira Joshi, vice president, SSD Test Division, Advantest America. “By expanding our proven MPT3000 system’s capabilities to address PCIe Gen 5 CXL, we are well positioned also to expand our relationships with important customers in the memory market.”

New TAS74000TS Measurement Solution Enables Materials Characterization for Beyond 5G

Advantest introduced a high frequency resolution option for its TAS7400TS terahertz optical sampling analysis system. It features excellent cost performance and ease of operation, and a new option that provides a groundbreaking measurement method for high-frequency characteristic evaluation of radio wave absorbers and base materials, which are indispensable for Beyond 5G / 6G next-generation communications technology and for the millimeter-wave radar technology used in ADAS (advanced driver assistance systems). 

Vector network analyzers (VNAs) have been widely used to evaluate the transmission characteristics (transmittance, reflectance) and complex permittivity of various materials in the millimeter-wave and high-frequency regions. But in recent years, it has become important to evaluate these characteristics over wider bandwidths, raising issues with VNAs on account of the time and effort required to set and calibrate each frequency band.

Advantest’s terahertz optical sampling system addresses these issues by enabling batch measurement over a wide band, utilizing pulsed electromagnetic waves. Measurements are now possible with a compact optical sampling system (measurement environment), saving on cost and space. It is also possible to analyze surface frequency characteristics with the mapping measurement option. Furthermore, the frequency resolution and scan speed of the new option are 5x that of the previous product, making this an optimal solution for evaluating the high frequency characteristics of new materials.

The solution will be exhibited at JASIS, from November 8th to 10th, and at MWE 2021, from November 24th to 26th.

Advantest Cloud Solutions

An Open Solutions Ecosystem for an Integrated Semiconductor Supply Chain  

Today’s semiconductor manufacturers face continual market pressures to design and produce increasingly intricate and complex ICs.

The traditionally used manual approaches for achieving and maintaining high yields are both time-consuming and expensive. As the complexity of chips increases, these traditional methods are becoming cost-prohibitive and less and less suitable for managing the data explosion in semiconductor manufacturing. At the same time, semiconductor manufacturers struggle to realize value from the data they collect.

To master this challenge, being able to integrate all data sources across the entire IC manufacturing supply chain is the most essential strategy. When combined with advanced analytics and machine learning capabilities, future-proof, real-time automated production control is in reach.

The Advantest Cloud Solutions^™(ACS) ecosystem helps customers accomplish intelligent data-driven workflows. The ACS ecosystem is a family of cloud-based products and technologies based on a single scalable data platform that allows customers to develop or procure market-leading solutions from Advantest and its partners. Automatically turning insights into automated production-control actions in real-time based on machine learning algorithms becomes possible in an easy to use and accessible way across the entire Advantest equipment portfolio.

This new ACS ecosystem enables customers to boost quality, yield, and operational efficiencies, and to accelerate product development and new product introductions for years to come.

Customer-driven products and services for integrated workflows

By building scalable products and offering complementary services aligned with customer needs, we ensure a thorough product-market fit. 

The ACS products and services enable customers to get more value out of their supply chain with focused workflow solutions for each stage of the IC design and manufacturing process, including:

• machine learning powered post-silicon-validation
• dynamic parametric test
• high-performance edge compute
• cloud-based test-program development and debug
• test equipment fleet monitoring
• predictive maintenance and OEE management. 

With test equipment and solution-driven ACS roadmaps closely integrated, Advantest is one of the only vendors capable of delivering a fully integrated test solution ecosystem. 

Best-in-class technology infrastructure for an end-to-end integrated supply chain

Advantest’s ACS Technology Platform, which powers all ACS Products & Services, is built upon PDF Solutions’ big data analytics platform, Exensio^®.  

The unique partnership between PDF Solutions Inc., a leading provider of advanced data analytics solutions, and Advantest Corporation, the world’s leading semiconductor test equipment supplier, enables a superior integration of the PDF Solutions Exensio^® platform with Advantest test equipment. 

The ACS Technology Platform is a highly secure and extendable platform consisting of a cloud-based data lake combined with powerful big data analytics to achieve unrivalled computing power, whenever and wherever needed. Customers can now “correlate anything to anything” across all IC test and equipment data throughout all stages of the IC development and manufacturing process to search for signatures that could not previously be seen or identified, all built in and verified to work with Advantest equipment. With these capabilities, new levels of actionable insights can be turned into long-lasting competitive advantages.

Advantest Offers Two New General-Purpose Hardware Units Compatible with T2000 Air-Cooled Test Platform

Advantest has introduced two new general-purpose hardware instruments – the 500MDM digital module and the DPS32A power supply module – to boost the capabilities of its T2000 test platform for a variety of applications such as system-on-a-chip (SoC) devices, power-management ICs, automotive devices and CMOS image sensors for the growing digital transformation market. Both new hardware units can be retrofitted onto existing test systems, such as the T2000 AiR platform whose compact design is ideal for use in environments ranging from engineering labs to volume manufacturing.

The semiconductor devices being mass produced for today’s fast-growing mobile electronics markets run on low power to enable longer battery life. Testing these ICs requires the ability to accommodate small currents and fast processing speeds while also applying highly accurate parametric measurements, a highly accurate voltage-output resource and deep scan pattern memories.

To fulfill these needs with its established T2000 test platform, Advantest has launched the new 128-channel, air-cooled 500MDM digital module, capable of handling devices with data rates up to 500 Mbps. In addition to having a large 32-Gbit scan pattern memory, the module features a dedicated high-performance parametric measurement unit for every 32 I/O channels, giving the system an expanded current capacity up to 60 milliamperes (mA) for every I/O channel.

The digital module is complemented by the new 32-amp DPS32A device power supply, designed to handle all types of consumer electronic devices. This upgraded system can deliver a one-amp current load and four volts of power across 32 channels. Its high-resolution parametric measurements and continuous sampling function enable a new test methodology of delta IDDQ measurement and IDD spectrum measurement. In addition, the new unit’s ability to measure ultra-low stand-by currents represents an improvement over its predecessor, the DPS500mA power supply.

The T2000 AiR air-cooled test platform is optimized for cost-efficient testing in R&D and volume production. It delivers the fastest operating speed and greatest scan pattern memory among all air-cooled testers available today. The tester’s modular architecture provides maximum flexibility, including the ability to accommodate the new 500MDM and DPS32A instruments. Because the T2000 AiR does not require water cooling, it can be installed anywhere. Additionally, the system’s software is fully compatible with all products in the highly scalable T2000 series.

Advantest Debuts Two New Advantest Cloud Solutions to Boost Production Efficiencies for New IC Designs

Advantest Corporation, working with its partner PDF Solutions Inc., has introduced two new innovative cloud-based software solutions: the ACS Dynamic Parametric Test (DPT) system powered by PDF Exensio® DPT, and an edge high performance compute (HPC) system. These solutions are part of the newly introduced Advantest Cloud Solutions™ (ACS), an ecosystem of cloud-based products and services. At the core of this ecosystem is the data- and analytics-focused platform, Advantest Cloud powered by PDF Exensio, which Advantest is co-developing with PDF Solutions.

Leveraging the core technology developed by PDF Solutions, the data generated from customer workflows is used to provide feedback on processes from semiconductor design validation to manufacturing, chip test, and system-level test. Customers can get more value out of their supply chain, their equipment, and their test data, to achieve faster time-to-yield with higher overall equipment efficiency by using advanced algorithms, integrated workflows, and methodologies delivered through Advantest Cloud Solutions.

Advances in semiconductor technology such as advanced process nodes, electrical scaling, 2.5D, and 3D packaging, and a new focus on systems present unique challenges that can only be solved through comprehensive software-guided solutions. Integrating traditional data silos throughout the semiconductor value chain can significantly improve product quality, manufacturing yield, and cost efficiencies.

The ACS Dynamic Parametric Test system powered by PDF Exensio® DPT, jointly developed by Advantest and PDF Solutions, adds rule-based, intelligent test flow adaptation to the V93000 SMU8 parametric test platform. With this technology, test flows are automatically optimized on-the-fly within milli-seconds to increase die test coverage, improve the characterization of aberrant measurements, correct equipment issues, and streamline the collection of additional data to support root-cause identification and down-stream analytics.

The new ACS edge HPC product can run complex test workloads with millisecond latencies and is available for early adopters. With pre-configured containers for machine learning (ML), demodulation, or other high-performance workloads, the system makes it easy to implement ML in semiconductor test. Besides allowing users to track, manage, and secure all containers from the cloud, it also provides on-demand access to previous insertion data through application programming interfaces (APIs) with built-in forward and backward data feeds. Customers can deploy machine learning models and algorithms in production, perform in-situ test flow optimizations, and remotely manage highly sensitive IP with maximum security.

Advantest DC Scale XPS256 DPS Card Ramps to Production at Leading Semiconductor Manufacturers

Advantest announced that its DC Scale XPS256 Device Power Supply (DPS) card, developed for use with the V93000 EXA Scale™ SoC test system, is now ramping to production-volume test at leading makers of communications processors. Providing the industry’s first universal DPS pin capability, the XPS256 delivers high accuracy, performance and dynamic response for a variety of data-driven applications.

Key markets such as mobile/broadband communications, high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) are driving unprecedented demand for massive data volumes. The XPS256 is designed to meet the associated stringent test-performance requirements, and leverages Advantest’s Xtreme Link™ technology to deliver massive scalability and flexibility.

The XPS256 covers wide-ranging current requirements, implementing unlimited ganging to scale from milliamps (mA) to thousands of Amps with no performance degradation. Combining three instruments in a single power supply, the DPS pin delivers best-in-class flexibility, accuracy (± 150µV) and dynamic response, with full four-quadrant voltage-current (VI) capabilities and very small overshoot/undershoot, enabled by Advantest’s Xtreme Regulation™. 

In addition, the card offers revolutionary probe needle protection and zero-overhead background profiling for current and voltage across the entire test flow; fine-granularity power delivery to ensure current balancing across the needles; and in-line contact-resistance monitoring for adaptive needle cleaning and preventive maintenance. With its ultra-fast hardware clamp, the XPS256 also protects the DUT, probe cards, and sockets against thermal runaways. 

When implemented with the V93000 EXA Scale SoC tester, the XPS256 DPS pin card provides a solution that can deliver high whole-wafer test yields, very fast test times, and reliable and repeatable results for customers entering the exascale computing space.

Advantest has already shipped several hundred DC Scale XPS256 DPS cards to multiple customers. To learn more about the V93000 EXA Scale Generation and DC Scale XPS256 DPS card, visit https://www.advantest.com/products/ic-test-systems/v93000/exa.