Graduate Assistant Research
Software development of an ATE monitoring system.
Summer 2002
Reference: Dr. Jay Porter
The idea behind Tester Sentry is to provide capability to companies that have many device testers like Texas Instruments. Each chip that is manufactured must be run through a tester. Down times can cause large delays and ultimately cost lost of money. Therefore, it would valuable to be able to immediately be notified when problems occur, and to maintain statistics on the testers performance and results to analyze what problems are occurring. Tester Sentry is an independent server machine that is designed to be a data sink for tester floors. All testers would connect to the server and provide information about its performance, and in case of emergencies, the server would immediately notify the correct personnel via emails, pages, web pages, etc... It is also a central location to store statistics for yield analysis.
The project was a lot of fun. I developed an extremely versatile and scalable server in LabVIEW. The ease of LabVIEW allowed for an extremely quick development time. This was actually the minor part of the project. The major part of this project was providing this client/server capability to the clients (the testers) and the test engineers. I developed an ActiveX EXE application in Visual Basic that can be implemented in the tester application software. This gives the test engineer a high degree of abstraction from the client/server tasks and TCP operations, and gives him/her the ability to use high level functions to do all the work. The basic capability and technology is in place, a proof of concept/demonstration is ready. The next step will be for Dr. Porter and Dr. Ochoa to contact Motorola and Texas Instruments and find out exactly what capability they would like for us to provide, so we can further develop the server functionality to suit their needs.