Lists

Tuesday, October 26, 2021

CIS Production BIST

ST and University of Montpellier publish a paper "A Fast and Low Cost Embedded Test Solution for CMOS Image Sensors" by Julia Lefèvre, Philippe Debaud, Patrick Girard, and Arnaud Virazel presented at 2021 IEEE International Test Conference (ITC).

"This paper presents a novel test solution directly embedded inside CMOS Image Sensors (CIS) to sort out PASS and FAIL dies during production test. The solution aims at reducing test time, which can represent up to 30% of the final product cost. By simplifying the way optical tests are usually applied with an ATE, the proposed Built-In Self-Test (BIST) solution overcomes the drawbacks of long test time and huge amount of test data storage. We experimented our solution by considering that roughly half of the tests usually performed with an ATE can be embedded and applied using the proposed fast and low cost BIST engine. Results obtained on more than 2,400 sensors have shown that our solution reduces test time by about 30% without impacting the defect coverage. The area cost of our solution is about 1% of the digital part of the sensor, i.e., approximately 0.25% of the total sensor area. The proposed embedded CIS test solution outperforms existing solutions in terms of area overhead and test time saving, thus encouraging its future implementation in an industrial production flow."

1 comment:

  1. Albert Theuwissen - Harvest ImagingOctober 27, 2021 at 9:30 AM

    This is an interesting paper, very easy to read and very informative. You hardly find scientific publications on testing of image sensors.
    Thanks Vladimir for your reference on your blog !

    ReplyDelete

All comments are moderated to avoid spam and personal attacks.