San Francisco, CA. With the semiconductor industry and its supply chain converging here this week, Xcerra took advantage of the opportunity to present its latest innovation in ATE. Building suspense for the introduction, president and CEO Dave Tacelli promised guests arriving at the restaurant venue chosen for the rollout that Xcerra personnel would plug in the new tester and get it up and running in the course of the early evening event, suggesting that whatever was introduced would run on 120 VAC without liquid cooling.
The new system, dubbed the DxV, lived up to its billing. Executives rolled it out (it weighs maybe 100 lbs. or so fully configured with instruments, according to Xcerra personnel present at the unveiling) and booted it up within a few minutes. Xcerra executives described the system as offering “…full semiconductor ATE performance in a desktop PC footprint,” although it might be best described as a “deskside” or “desk-under” compact system.
In essence, the DvX accepts up to five of Xcerra’s DiamondX DC to high-speed instruments, with more than 1,000 pin resources available for high-volume production needs. Because DiamondX incorporates a PCIe architecture, any chosen five instruments for the DxV can be readily augmented with instruments in an additional PXI chassis. Such a mix could present integration challenges in a high-volume manufacturing environment, but as Steve Wigley, tester group vice president, pointed out, engineering organizations would have the flexibility to experiment with what might ultimately become the optimum manufacturing solution.
The DxV features a workstation fully integrated into the test head, making an external PC unnecessary. The company touts the system for post silicon validation and evaluation, engineering-sample quality testing and analysis, IoT and sensor testing, and high-throughput wafer and WLCSP test applications.
