Statistical silicon results of dynamic power integrity control of ATE for eliminating overkills and underkills

This paper demonstrates our dynamic power integrity control for eliminating the overkills/underkills due to the difference of power supply impedance between an automatic test equipment (ATE) and a practical operating environment of the device under test (DUT). It injects compensation currents into the power supply nodes on the ATE system in a feed-forward manner such that the ATE power supply waveform matches with the one on the customer's operating environment of the DUT. Experimental results of delay fault testing with 105 real silicon chips show that 48% of overkills/underkills due to the different power supply characteristics can be eliminated by our dynamic power integrity control. Furthermore, it was found that adjusting the magnitude of the power integrity control based on the chip-to-chip active power variation improves the correlation of the test results between the ATE and the customer environment, resulting in 95% of the overkills/underkills can be eliminated.