Active tester interface unit design for data collection

During device characterization it is not uncommon to find test and product engineers spending hours and hours of time on the ATE to verify AC measurements using oscilloscopes and time interval analyzers. Device performance boards are carefully designed with controlled impedance paths to match the tester pin electronics card to the DUT. For getting more accuracy than available from the ATE, scopes and TIA´s are used in production testing to guarantee specific parameters such as pll jitter and clock frequency measurements. With the recent emergence of source synchronous busses on high speed devices, external equipment is used to make output-to-output AC measurements during device validation. Taking such measurements on a 64-pin bus device over several operating voltages and temperatures with a pair of probes may take several days. This manual approach, in addition to being time consuming, is also prone to operator errors and suffers from poor repeatability. This work describes an approach using a unique performance board design, with embedded resistors to emulate scope probes close to the DUT and high speed muxes on the board, to cut the data collection time from hours or even days to minutes. Data collected using the manual and automated method are compared.