Cleveland, Ohio – Keithley Instruments, Inc. (NYSE:KEI) announces a partnership with Stratosphere Solutions, Inc. Keithley's partnership with Stratosphere Solutions will address advanced process development and monitoring using an Array TEG (test element group) technology.
Parametric process variation at the sub-65nm level is posing significant challenges to design and test engineers as IC manufacturers seek to produce ever-smaller devices. The semiconductor industry is seeing a rapidly growing need for monitoring extremely sensitive production processes in order to optimize IC performance without sacrificing yields.
Keithley and Stratosphere Solutions will work together to provide mutual customers with a unique characterization infrastructure that includes high volume, high throughput, and reliable parametric measurements using Keithley's Series S600 Parametric Testers and StratoPro™ IP to ensure customer success.
Keithley's Series S600 Parametric Testers help fabs and wafer foundries reduce their cost of test by being adaptable to changing device technologies. Their ability to be repurposed as very minimal cost DC, RF, and array TEG testers provides capital equipment reuse and therefore lowers the cost of test. The latest in the Series S600, the Model S680, combines, in a single test system, parallel testing capability, high DC sensitivity, femtoamp-level resolution, and RF s-parameter measurements up to 40GHz. This provides the industry's highest throughput and a lower cost of ownership for measurements at the 65nm node and beyond.
Array TEG structures, like Stratosphere's award-winning StratoPro product suite, are increasingly becoming mission-critical for characterizing semiconductor processes as geometries shrink below 65nm. Leading edge semiconductor companies desire a de facto standard product, StratoPro, which delivers thousands of times higher density for the same silicon area, highest resolution measurements, and improved overall test integrity.
StratoPro™, a Parametric ActiveMatrix™ silicon IP platform, empowers fab and fab-lite customers to characterize with high accuracy, within-die statistics of electrical parameters and their variability. Customers choose the 65nm and 45nm silicon-proven StratoPro platform, because it provides 10 to 1000x greater test structure density, performs very high resolution measurements, and, coupled with the Keithley tester platform, provides significant improvement in test time. Fab customers use StratoPro™ during early process development, yield ramp, and production monitoring. Fab-lite customers use the solution to characterize design-style dependent process variations.
.:Design World:.
Filed Under: Semiconductor, Electronics • electrical, Test + measurement • test equipment
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