NI provides complete measurement and control solutions for the semiconductor industry, which will facilitate the development of 5G and millimeter waves.

The semiconductor industry is winning the next slogan: the forefront of the evolution of next-generation wireless communications, the increasing number of IoT deployments, the reach of autonomous vehicles, the convergence of different technologies, and the increasing intelligence of devices... The role of testing is increasingly important. "Semiconductor testing has always been a strategic focus area for NI. With a platform-based approach, NI's semiconductor test solutions can ensure product quality, maintain price competitive advantage, and adapt to tight market cycles as the industry continues to increase the need for chip integration. Alex Davern, CEO of NaTIonal Instruments (NI), believes that NI's semiconductor test solutions have their own unique positioning in the industry. In fact, only the flow of the NI booth during the SEMICON CHINA 2018, which just ended, can be used to see the heat of the semiconductor test field and how the NI test plan is “popular”.

Figure 1. The NI Semiconductor Test Solution unveiled SEMICON CHINA 2018 to attract attention and semiconductor test heat continues to rise.

Focusing on semiconductor testing, Pan Jianan, NI's semiconductor market development manager in Greater China, said in the interview of SEMICON CHINA 2018 that this field is forming a trend of three shares. First, from laboratory feature analysis to mass production testing; second, It is to maintain the advanced nature of the industry. On the one hand, it refers to the further support of new standards and new technologies such as 5G NR and millimeter wave. On the other hand, it also refers to the advancement of test leadership, such as the use of artificial intelligence to optimize semiconductor test efficiency; Third, the need for system-level testing (SLT) for system-in-package (SiP) is on the rise. These three trends will eventually merge into one demand, which is flexible, scalable, and able to adapt to new standards and protocols, ensuring the lowest total cost of ownership and the shortest time-to-market intelligent test solution. one of them.

Figure 2. Pan Jianan (left), National Semiconductor Market Development Manager, NI Greater China, and NI Technology Market Engineer Maris (right), who were interviewed by the media during SEMICON CHINA.

From the seamless analysis of laboratory characteristics to mass production testing, it is necessary to mention the Semiconductor Test System (STS) that NI can quickly deploy to production test environments. “Since the formal market-oriented market at the end of 2014, NI STS, the standard test machine, has deployed more than 500 units worldwide,” Pan Jianan stressed. As we all know, in the past, the semiconductor testing market has been monopolized by several industry giants that provide traditional ATE equipment. It can “kill” a blue ocean in this red sea. It has been widely recognized in just a few years. NI STS must have its own Unique:

First, the test cost: the test cost is not only the amount of the test equipment purchased, but also the maintenance cost of the customer. The high complexity of the traditional ATE equipment brings high maintenance costs. As an open industry standard, the PXI platform is the foundation for all of NI's development of its test systems. In addition, due to the use of the unified development environment LabVIEW and test management software TestStand in laboratory and production testing, the consistency of hardware and software, It is the key to maximizing the efficiency of semiconductor testing and reducing the cost of testing by NI STS during the testing process.

Second, test parallelism: equipped with FPGA accelerated computing, through the modular features of PXI with NI TestStand software for automatic scheduling of NI semiconductor testing solutions, not only can complete more test projects in a shorter time, to achieve MulTI-site parallel testing is even more important.

Third, scalability: According to Pan Jianan, customers generally use NI's PXI platform in laboratory testing. NI integrates the instrument to form a standard test machine STS suitable for mass production testing, and for higher channel counts. For testing needs, NI can extend STS from T1 systems to T2 and T4 systems.

Figure 3. (Top): The internal architecture of NI STS is based on the PXI platform; (Bottom): NI's semiconductor test solution can be flexibly extended from the PXI platform to the NI STS system based on customer needs.

Getting through the lab to mass production testing, compatible with more cutting-edge technologies has also become a top priority for semiconductor testing. As we all know, the development of semiconductor technology can be said to be the key to the development of various frontier applications. Therefore, the continuous development of technologies such as 5G and millimeter wave will bring infinite challenges to the field of semiconductor test and test. Turning to the more popular 5G chips in the market, modern RF front-end modules are increasingly packaging more modules (such as power amplifiers, low-noise amplifiers, etc.) into a single component, while front-end modules support multi-mode multi-band. Increased the complexity of the entire test.

For example, Qorvo's latest commercially available 5G RF front-end module QM19000 is a package of a power amplifier and a low-noise amplifier. And with the flexibility of the NI PXI system, Qorvo can reuse the same hardware in the test and quickly test its 5G FEM design using a variety of waveforms. Qorvo said, "The high bandwidth, excellent RF performance and flexibility of the NI PXI test system are critical to helping us launch the industry's first commercial 5G front-end module."

In addition, at the end of last year, 3GPP just officially released the first draft of the 5G NR standard, and in the same period of MWC 2018, NI recently introduced a Sub-6GHz 5G test reference solution conforming to the 3GPP Release 15 specification of 5G New Air Interface (NR). According to NI technical market engineer Maris, NI's new reference test solution is not only well suited for testing new wideband RFICs, especially RFICs operating in the 3.3-4.2 GHz and 4.4-5.0 GHz bands, and a key part of the solution is NI-RFmx NR measurement software, which will evolve with the pace of 3GPP specifications.

Figure 4. This time, the SEMICON CHINA 2018, NI is also bringing the latest and most comprehensive semiconductor test solution.

For millimeter-wave applications, NI millimeter-wave systems accelerate the prototype verification and test system from baseband to RF front-end with flexible and scalable modular instruments. It is reported that NI's millimeter-wave system combines flexible modular hardware with powerful software to support Up to 2GHz bandwidth signal transceiving, suitable for basic configuration of bidirectional and unidirectional systems, can be extended from SISO to MIMO.

"In addition to the NI wafer-level mass production test just mentioned, NI will also collaborate to expand our wafer testing capabilities in the lab through an ecosystem partner like PDA." Pan Jianan believes NI is always carrying the ecological power to overcome the challenges of semiconductor testing.

"Boda Micro should be said to be a company that uses artificial intelligence (AI) in the semiconductor field," said Li Yanfeng, CEO of Boda Micro. "The application model is to make testing faster, more accurate, and more powerful." In the future megatrend, the algorithm is forming a new wave of help. This time, Boda Micro was also invited to unveil NI's booth at SEMICON CHINA, exhibiting the newly released semiconductor parametric test product FS380-Pro based on NI PXI source measurement unit (SMU) at the beginning of this year. Current and voltage test function, CV capacitor voltage test function, 1/f Noise low-frequency noise test function, Pulse pulse generation function, realize the requirement of completing all tests in a single instrument, and increase the test speed by 10 times.

Figure 5. Boda Micro's latest machine-parameter-based semiconductor parametric test product, the FS380-Pro, unveiled the NI SEMICON booth.

Although it is currently focused on parametric testing in the laboratory, Li Yanfeng bluntly stated that “the future is about mass production”, and from this perspective, the architecture of NI provides an infinite parallel possibility. “The essence of returning to semiconductor testing, we NI's philosophy is extremely consistent," said Li Yanfeng. "The first priority is fast. The reduction in test time is directly related to the further reduction of test costs. The second point is flexibility. New things must emerge to support an uncertain future."

Figure 6. A list of some of NI's partners in the field of semiconductor testing.

"In the test system, the status of software is becoming more and more important," Pan Jianan said bluntly. "NI's cooperation with Bodawei is to value their algorithm advantages. In fact, NI is also more and more focused on software on the test machine. Core position, or go to more cooperation with vendors, or to improve the software on the test machine, like TestStand, LabVIEW and Systemlink."

The software-centric modular, high-flexibility NI semiconductor test solution is gradually showing its advantages in the evolution of the trend. This year, the joint development of NI SEMICON CHINA is using the open system-level test solution (SLT) of NI. Implementation of a system-level test project for its latest 4G LTE modem chip. “We only completed the development of the SLT system-level test project in just three months and successfully deployed it on the production line. “We also believe that this is the convenience of LabVIEW and TestStand for the convenience of engineers.

In fact, traced to the roots, as early as the introduction of STS in 2014, NI's semiconductor test solution has been unanimously praised by leading companies including Qualcomm, TI, ADI and BOSCH, in WLAN testing, PMIC power management chip testing The data converter ADC/DAC, MEMS test project plays a high value, and the evaluation given by the customer is also highly focused on "high flexibility to support different test configurations", "test throughput, coverage and reliability improvement". “Simplify the test time advantage of data associations, accelerate time-to-market” and “further reduction in test costs”.

“A lot of customers are very fond of our flexible modular solutions,” Pan Jian said. “But they also put forward the need for standardization, so we decided to use a two-track strategy that provides both an open PXI platform and a standard STS. Tester. And our solution is brought to market, and immediately brings a refreshing feeling to the industry."

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