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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tony Viola who wrote (41502)	11/15/1998 1:09:00 AM
From: Elmer	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 1574033

Re: "Elmer, nice description of bin testing, etc. One question, does any semiconductor company do final, packaged test at elevated and low temperatures anymore? " For cost reasons the goal is to get to 1 socketing. Usually hot as that is the worst case, carrier mobility is worse at higher temp. Some assembly defects may not be worse case at temp but can be guardbanded by the method you mention. Other process problems require low temp testing and I know of at least 1 major manufacturer that does wafer sort at cold temp in a nitrogen atmosphere. Anyone who is doing room temperature only testing is making a major quality compromise and I don't believe either Intel or AMD fall into this category. Again refering to the K7 because it is such a good example, testing of the BSB at full processor frequencies would require a guardband that would exceed the timing specification itself as well as the accuracy of any production tester on the market, making it in effect untestable, and therefore by conventional methods, unmanufacturable, but this is the AMD thread and hype is more important than facts. Incidentally, Rambus poses many of the same problems with a data rate of 800mhz, but that's another story.... EP