Test Engineering Education in Europe: the EuNICE-Test Project

The paper deals with a European experience of education in industrial test of ICs and SoCs using remote testing facilities. The project addresses the problem of the shortage in microelectronics engineers aware with the new challenge of testing mixed-signal SoCs for multimedia/telecom market. It aims at providing test training facilities at a European scale in both initial and continuing education contexts. This is done by allowing the academic and industrial partners of the consortium to train engineers using the common test resources center (CRTC) hosted by LIRMM (Laboratoire d'Informatique, de Robotique et de Microélectronique de Montpellier, France). CRTC test tools include up-to-date/high-tech testers that are fully representative of real industrial testers as used on production testfloors. At the end of the project, it is aimed at reaching a cruising speed of about 16 trainees per year per center. Each trainee will have attend at least one one-week training using the remote test facilities of CRTC. 1. EuNICE-Test Genesis This European network for test education is mainly based on the French CRTC experience [1-3]. A mixed approach is chosen, that combines both distributed and centralized test resources. Indeed, considering the huge cost of high-tech IC testers, the idea is to develop a one and only one test center for all the European academic partners. To avoid any expensive traveling of students from their university to CRTC in Montpellier, the implementation has been thought to make the CRTC tester reachable by net from any remote center. CRTC is mainly equipped with high performing ATEs such as Agilent 83000-F330t VLSI tester. In each of the European centers, a server with test software facilities is implemented to allow the local development of test programs (Figure 1). Figure 1. Network implementation for remote test At the very last moment of the physical test, trainees connect on CRTC tester through the net and execute the test of the Device-Under-Test (DUT). Such an original remote testing implementation permits to save money first by equipping only one test center with performing resources and second by avoiding expensive costs induced by trainees traveling and accommodations. x Remote center