Smart Scale platform tests optical transceivers for Avago

Makoto Nakahara, senior vice president of sales for Advantest, comments: “Winning this business shows that Advantest can provide highly productive and cost-effective test solutions for applications beyond mainstream semiconductor production."

A highly parallel 16-site wafer-sort solution for the 28 nm technology node and beyond, the V93000 Smart Scale solution comes equipped with an A-Class test head, two Pin Scale 1600 digital channel cards and a VI32 card. The scalable tester features a universal per-pin architecture, offering advanced capabilities to deliver customized solutions that lower the total cost of test.

Advantest’s Pin Scale 1600 card achieves unprecedented DC accuracy. It is designed to meet the requirements of testing 28 nm semiconductors that operate at much lower supply-voltage levels. Improving parallel-test efficiency, the digital channel card uses per-pin features including on-the-fly pattern changes, clock-domain-per-pin, protocol-engine-per-pin, PRBS-per-pin and SmartLoop. Advantest’s DC Scale VI32 card, scalable from 16 to 32 channels, has the flexibility to handle multiple applications while providing precise voltages and supporting multiple power domains.

“With the V93000 Smart Scale solution, we get all the features of a fully integrated SoC tester along with scalability at a price that is comparable with our previous solution. Additionally, we have been able to achieve four times the level of multi-site testing. We plan to move most of our high-volume production to the V93000 Smart Scale platform,” commented Faouzi Chaahoub, senior director of FOPD for Avago.