Anaheim, CA. OptimalTest at this year's International Test Conference continued what's becoming a tradition of asking a major customer to describe its use of the OT tool suite. This year's presenter was Gary Eves, who works in the product engineering group at Broadcom. He described how Broadcom, its OSATs, and OT worked together to implement a yield-management and reporting system based on OT software.
Eves described Broadcom as an employer of 11,000 people worldwide and having revenue of $7.4 billion. The company has 17,000 patents or patent applications, and he estimated that 99.98% of all data traffic crosses a Broadcom chip.
The OT-based system, Eves said, closes the gap between actual yield levels and the levels the company knows it could achieve. Traditionally, he said, teams held monthly yield meetings in which participants might identify a problem like a bad load board. The OT system speeds the identification of issues ranging from bad contacts to test-program problems. The system also, he said, helps to support part average testing (PAT), used for automotive and other applications.
Eves noted that the system can support preventative-maintenance tracking, ROI assessment, data-analysis, outlier detection, data mining, root-cause analysis, rule setting, and report generation. The goal, he said, is to deploy the OT software across all products and all business units as well as throughout Broadcom's supply chain. Rule automation is a key to success, he concluded.
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