ATE test cell is the major production equipment used in OSAT factory test floor. Managing and operating test cell efficiently is essential to factory overall equipment effectiveness (OEE). In the past, point solutions were widely used for test cell operation such as production test, maintenance, status monitoring, data collection and analysis. This leads to different software tooling used for different test cell activities, which is hard to integrate and maintain. It also lacks good interoperability among the software and between the software and the test cell, which is essential for building factory automation solutions.
Being the key enabler to industry 4.0, IoT is a convergence of embedded systems, network connectivity, real time monitoring and remote control, and automation. To make it easy to build and launch IoT solutions, major cloud service providers such as AWS also provides IoT platforms and services, which include complete hardware and software protocols covering deployment, devices, data with security, and integration with cloud. By building solutions upon IoT, test cell operation can be optimized on a common architectural ground for better efficiency, interoperability, and scalability. Moreover, better insights could be obtained by using cloud to analyze the data collected.
ACS TE-Cloud is Advantest’s one-stop test engineering environment on cloud. It offers cloud-based test program development environment as well as device testing on remote engineering testers. With TE-Cloud, we explored using IoT and cloud technologies to optimize test cell operation solutions.
In this presentation, we would like to share principles of IoT technology first. Since we use AWS as the infrastructure to host TE-Cloud, secondly, we’ll share how we can use AWS IoT as a single consistent approach to cover common aspects of the test cell operation such as collecting and analyzing tester configuration data for device test planning, usage and maintenance data for utilization report, authenticating and controlling remote tester operation, and doing over-the-air (OTA) installation and upgrade of the software on the test cell. Thirdly we’ll conclude the advantage of the solution comparing with legacy approach. Lastly, looking forward, we’ll talk about how the methodology could be used extensively to enable smart OSAT factories. By managing all test cells as well as other production equipment through IoT, technicians could control and manage the entire factory test floor in a single dashboard from anywhere, obtain good insights and make predictions from the data collected and analyzed with AI / ML on cloud.
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