Flow Control Status Report 5/4/98

Participants

Francisco Hernadez
Gregg Wilder
Ernie Wahl
Don Organ
Tony Taylor
Greg Maston
Warren Davis
Phil Barch
Jim Dexter
Mike Purtell
Spass Stoiantschewsky
Sundar Lakshmipathy

Agreements

target a "trial-use" standard
we'll STIL'ize enVision as a strawman

Open Issues

Source language versus an execution environment (datalogging, test counts, a trace of execution) .
Interface with TestMethods.

Requirements Considered

test sequencing/flow (multiple threads)

sequencing is 1 dimenisonal, flows define multiple paths
multiple thread processing may be necessary for mixed signal
data flow versus control flow
different flows for different test conditions (QA vs final test) - or variations on the same flow depending on different test conditions

test sites (where special processing may be required), (May be 2 separate issues - different tests for different device types, and different tests for every Nth device) Examples:

testing special test-dice on a wafer.
environmental testing? of every Nth device.
characterization flow - for every Nth device.
separate power-up and power-down flows for different devices.
separate flows from Loading and Unloading a program.
generation of interim summary reports - after every Nth wafer

test flow parameters/options
expression processing as function of flow

variables will be used both for pre-conditioning as well as results representation (which may be "tested" later - resulting in a change to the flow).

multi-site

We shouldn't do anything that will prevent an ATE vendor from implementing a multi-site solution.

status message (to operator)
test identification

A unique ID for a particular test (at what level of abstraction should the test be?)

binning

Hardware bins. Software bins (name and number). Terminal and non-terminal. Used for collecting data for summary.
Rule-based (chaining) versus control flow.

flow statitistical reports

We have no responsibilities beyond our binning requirement.
Where is boundary between design/device information versus factory process management? How far should STIL go?

Multiple threads

multi-site
concurrent execution (for mixed signal or cores) - numerical processing is a good candidae
let's avoid forks and joins as a programming construct

easy to maintain

avoid redundent information

Others

a common base class for all test methods
flow related variables that are not associated with any specific test object.
sub-flows

Next Steps

Formalize requirements
STIL'zing enVision
Develop a formal data model
development of use cases