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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices

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To: Paul Engel who wrote (28076)	1/23/1998
From: Elmer	Read Replies (1) of 1585830

Paul, very good analysis of the situation. You bring up a very significant point that I have never seen addressed. Silicon is outrunning testers. There are only a small handful of vendors of top of the line, state of the art production testers for highspeed ICs like Intel's Pentiums, DEC's Alpha, and to a lesser extent, AMD's K6. They are very expensive and the ability of vendors to meet the demand for new equipment is seriously in question. If Intel and AMD are going to be shipping millions of processors running at many 100s of MHZ and requiring timing resolution and accuracy in the pico seconds, it has a lot of manufacturing people very worried about how they are going to get a reliable tester to use in production. Wouldn't it be ironic if CPU's get so fast they can't be tested anymore? Your mention of BIST is a good example of modern methods. Full and partial scan is another one, but in the end, they still have to run them at their rated speed, unless they are willing to make major compromises in quality. You can't tell a 233mhz K6 from a 200mhz K6 unless you really run them at that speed. The same will be true for a 450mhz vrs a 500mhz. EP

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