Verigy installs first V93000 tester with 8 Gbps per pin, high-speed memory card at Korean customer’s facility

CUPERTINO, USA: Verigy, a premier semiconductor test company, has installed and qualified its first production-ready V93000 HSM6800 system at the facility of an unnamed customer in Korea.

This new system is the only at-speed, high-yield testing solution for today’s ultra-fast GDDR5 memory ICs with operating speeds above 4 gigabits per second (Gbps) per pin. It provides a significant throughput advantage compared to other ultra-high-speed memory test systems on the market today.

Approximately 90 percent of all GDDR5 devices are manufactured in Korea, according to the market research firm iSuppli Corp. By testing these fast memories at-speed and with full feature sets, Verigy’s V93000 HSM6800 system allows customers to address high-growth semiconductor markets, such as advanced graphics cards that generate more realistic, higher resolution images.

Verigy’s new tester has been installed for engineering and production test of the customer’s latest chip designs. When available, the system also is being used to test both samples and high volumes of ICs from the fab.

“Our V93000 HSM6800 system has 8-Gbps-per-pin capability to provide longer life time and coverage for multi-generation memory devices with the best yield,” said Hans-Juergen Wagner, Verigy’s vice president of SOC test solutions. “During qualification, the tester delivered higher yield and higher throughput than competitive systems, providing better ROI to the customer.”

The rich feature set on Verigy’s V93000 HSM6800 system supports testing of many advanced functions on GDDR5 devices, including address bus inversion (ABI), data bus inversion (DBI) and cyclic redundancy check (CRC). These are features that are expected to be used for DDR4 also. In addition, the tester’s flexible APG architecture can test memories with common 8-bit frames and is extendible to test future generations of memories with 10-bit frames.

With its scalable design, Verigy’s V93000 HSM series is the only platform to fulfill the performance, functionality and economic requirements for testing all available high-speed memory technologies.

In addition to this new tester, the customer has an installed base of Verigy’s previous generation of V93000 HSM3600 systems, which it has been using for four years to test high-speed memory ICs.