Advantest Corporation validates semiconductors with specialized electrical and thermal tests. As semiconductors become smaller and more complex and the stakes for their reliability and performance rise, the company is partnering and scaling up for long-term growth.
What role does testing play in the development and launch of semiconductors?
Testing has changed a lot over the last couple of decades, and even more in the last few years. A test was once a necessary evil that companies had to do just to screen parts before they went out into consumer electronics. Today, with the rise of computing infrastructure and particularly AI, testing is really seen as a value-adding step ensuring quality. Devices are getting much more complicated. Modern semiconductors are like tiny cities now, made up of many interconnected blocks. The vulnerabilities range from transistor problems to opens and shorts in electrical current pathways to leakage and voltage issues. We are testing entire functionalities in a very short period of time. Did you design it right? Did you fabricate it right? If not, we will find out in a test. This information becomes valuable the earlier it is shared with silicon fabricators and chip designers.
There is a lot of opportunity for collaboration between front-end equipment companies, materials companies and testers like Advantest with end results. Applied Materials is a major front-end player in chemical and vapor deposition, etching and other tools. They developed the Equipment and Process Innovation and Commercialization (EPIC) Center, where partners create test vehicles together and make samples. We will be able to preview next-generation silicon and 3-D packages maybe several years before launch so we can develop the necessary test instruments and solutions and show customers what they need in their processes and equipment. There has not been a collaboration like this in the industry for quite some time and I am happy to see so many other companies joining, including many of our customers.
Can you describe Advantest’s testing and when it happens during production?
Testing begins while the semiconductor is still on a silicon wafer, before it is diced into individual chips. Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS), microneedles, make electrical contact so the tester can send and receive signals from the device. The wafer is then diced into individual dies and tested again before packaging. After packaging, the semiconductor may be tested several more times, including in a system-level test format at the very end of production. We can see one semiconductor a dozen or more times during its test. Thermal stressing is increasingly important to make sure products can withstand their final environment.
Semiconductor geometry shrinking down to the sub-two nanometer scale means producers are packing more into silicon. In some cases, there are billions of transistors in a single device and we have to test them all. This impacts the density of our instruments and testers. For example, we have to have more digital pins that send test signals and fit them in a tighter package in our instruments. And as the number of transistors increases, power requirements also tend to rise, creating new challenges in energy efficiency and thermal management.
How is Advantest managing extreme power and cooling demands?
Everyone understands how hot a stove burner can get. That heat is maybe 10 watts per square centimeter.
Some advanced semiconductor devices can reach 20 times that level of power density in the same small area. In terms of power density, that can approach levels comparable to the surface of the sun. We have to dissipate all of that power in a very short period of time with advanced technologies to cool down these devices during the test. Otherwise, you get something called thermal runaway and the device will burn up–it runs that hot.
We are producing a lot more testers and conducting more tests, so total energy consumption is still going up–a challenge I think the whole world is facing right now with data centers and semiconductors in general. Advantest has focused heavily on efficient cooling and energy management. We use a lot of closed-system liquid cooling and are switching to water cooling in almost all cases to move away from PFAS-related cooling materials because of environmental concerns. PFAS have been around for a long time, and the 400 publicly owned wastewater treatment facilities in the U.S. keeps these substances in enclosed systems. Still, the semiconductor industry has been pretty good about starting to move away from them.
How, and in what directions, does Advantest plan on growing in upcoming years?
We are very good at solving customer and industry problems. Capacity expansion is next–it is one thing to be able to do one or two tester solutions and another to do 10,000 of them with testers that have a million parts and a lot of manual labor remains in these processes. We also have to continuously innovate through automation of test content development, distribution and moving of test content around in different insertions and new tester architectures for efficiency. Silicon photonics and optical data transmission are major growth areas. Optical-level data transmission is a very big deal now but testing high manufacturing volumes remains highly complex. For this reason, the photonics industry has been around for a while but not operated at high-volume manufacturing–it is now, with companies like Advantest deeply involved.
How does testing affect end users?
Testing and measurement has been around forever. Hewlett-Packard was built on test instrumentation expertise. So was Advantest, which came from Takeda Riken, established 73 years ago in Japan by a couple of guys in a garage developing electronic measuring instruments. Through our acquisition of Verigy, which had its origins in Hewlett-Packard’s semiconductor test business, Advantest has also inherited a deep legacy of expertise from the U.S. test industry. The majority of semiconductors in the world go across our testers. Parts in all the electronics people have in their house–be it a microwave, car, computer or your phone–have touched Advantest testers and we have ensured the quality of those devices for the world. We are proud of that.
