INQUIRER guide to testing memory

LET'S SAY YOU you suddenly find yourself needing to test 25,000 memory devices an hour, where do you go? Lets also pretend that you need to sort, bin, and twiddle them while you are at it. If this is laid on your desk Monday morning, go out and buy a Techwing 380 backed by a dozen stacked Nextest Magnums.

The front end is the most visually impressive bit, that is the Techwing 380 transport. What it does is take trays of chips and put them into other trays, and shoves them into the tester. When the tester is done, it sorts and bins them so you can tell good from bad, fast from slow and the like.

The 380 is really visually impressive, there were seven or eight visible robots whizzing around moving things to and fro, it was pretty hypnotic. All of that is to feed the Magnums on the back end, and they look visually unimpressive, but are where the action is. Here are a dozen of them on the back of a 380.

Each Magnum grouping has 7680 I/O channels, 9600 in total if you count power, so you can test a lot of chips. The Magnum has five single board testers, and that does a 1/12th of the above independently. Each board is a full PC and tester, 5 to a Magnum, 12 Magnums in a cluster, and a lone controller for 61 PCs total.

The whole thing is self contained, needing no special power or cooling, plug and play. It is 100% Windows based, so everything should be relatively familiar to an operator, and somewhat maintainable.

So when your boss comes in Monday and asks you to set this all up, ask him for a check in the $2.7 million range, about $2 million of which goes to Nextest, $700K or so to Techwing, and there you have it. From that point, you have 25,000 chips an hour, 600,000 or so a day less to sort by hand. µ