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Rambus testers for volume production won't be ready until next year
A service of Semiconductor Business News, CMP Media Inc.
Story posted 8:30 p.m. EST/5:30 p.m., PST, 7/15/99
By Jack Robertson
SAN JOSE -- High throughput Direct Rambus DRAM testers are promised to be available in the first quarter of 2000 -- casting a cloud on the possibility of volume production this year for the next-generation memory chip.
Sources at Semicon West '99 here said that Advantest Corp. will introduce a parallel 64-station Direct RDRAM tester at Semicon Japan in December. Hewlett-Packard Co.'s Automated Test Group said a parallel 32-station version of its HP95000 high-speed memory tester will be availible as early as the first quarter of 2000.
Both firms have 1-gigahertz speed testers now for Direct Rambus, but limited to 8-to-16 parallel stations. That throughput is adequate for initial low-volume production runs of Direct RDRAM, but memory chip makers want more parallelism to cut costs with shorter testing cycles.
Schlumberger Automated Test Equipment will have a higher parallel test station Direct RDRAM tester at the first of next year, said Jackie Tubis, president of Schlumberger ATE in San Jose. The firm already has a family of different Direct RDRAM testers -- from a unit for development characterization to thermal testing to final package testing.
She agreed with some analysts that the high heat dissipation of Direct RDRAM requires special handling, but said Schlumberger is using thermal techniques adapted from testing high-heat advanced microprocessors.
Less sanguine was George Chamillard, president of Teradyne Inc., who said parallel testing at 800-MHz speed of both Direct RDRAM memory and logic in 64 parallel stations is going to be more of a challenge than expected. "It may be late next year before parallel 64-station (Direct Rambus) testers come to market," the Boston-based executive cautioned.
Intel Corp., which is trying to establish Direct RDRAM as the industry's standard next generation memory, has predicted a fast production ramp after the new chip's debt, set for September. A major roadblock for high mass production is the lack of high throughput Direct RDRAM testers.
All test firms, however, said major memory producers have enough 8-and-16-station Direct RDRAM testers to meet initial production needs. But Gary Fleeman, Advantest America memory product manager, said many large DRAM makers are holding back on big-volume Direct RDRAM tester orders waiting to see how the market develops.
But chip makers are also closely watching the emerging Double Data Rate (DDR) SDRAM rival to Direct RDRAM. They can test development DDR chips by stretching their current 250-MHz testers.
However, Gayn Erickson, semiconductor test product marketing manager for Hewlett-Packard ATG in Santa Clara, Calif., said production level quantities of DDR will also require new test equipment to handle higher speed protocols and new control protocols. He claimed the HP95000 memory tester using flexible pattern generation programs can handle both Direct Rambus and DDR.
Advantest's Fleeman said his firm is developing a new DDR tester, but no introduction date has yet been set. |
