Keithley test systems win favour with X-FAB

26th September 2014

Mick Elliott

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Keithley Instruments has won orders for additional S530 Parametric Test Systems from X-FAB Silicon Foundries. X-FAB, a Germany-based foundry for analogue/mixed-signal devices and micro electro-mechanical systems (MEMS), ordered low power versions of the S530 tester for installation on the main production line at its facility in Kuching, Malaysia, where high voltage S530 systems are already in place.

Steffen Richter, X-FAB’s group manager for process control monitoring, will present a paper on the joint X-FAB/Keithley effort involving the initial S530 correlation and speed optimisation project at the 16th European Manufacturing Test Conference (EMTC), to be held during SEMICON Europa 2014 in Grenoble, France (Oct 7-9). The paper, “Optimising Automatic Parametric Test (APT) in Mixed Signal/MEMS Foundry,” is co-authored with Alex Pronin, a lead applications engineer at Keithley.

Announcing the sale, Keithley general manager Mike Flaherty noted, “X-FAB has relied on Keithley parametric test systems for many years. Based on their experience with our S530 high voltage systems, X-FAB decided to add Keithley low power systems to their main production line.”

Flaherty continued, “Keithley’s personnel worked closely with the engineering teams to ensure the results correlated well with those from their existing testers. Our applications team converted thousands of lines of original test system code and then performed correlation tests, matching more than 1200 parameters to within 3 percent of the original vendor’s data.”