Keynote Speaker: Davide Appello

Davide Appello
Director of Product Engineering
STMicroelectronics

Davide Appello is director of product engineering at the Automotive Digital Products division of STMicroelectronics, in Agrate Brianza, Italy. He has held various positions in the area of testability and testing within ST where he joined the automotive digital team in 2005. Currently he is in charge of managing all industrialization activities (probe and package) for all ranges of digital products for automotive including MCU’s with embedded non-volatile memories, devices for infotainment and ADAS.

Davide earned a degree in Electronic Engineering from the “Alma Ticinensis Universitas” of Pavia in Italy. He is active with IEEE-TTTC and he is currently vice-chair for the automotive and reliability test workshop (ART) and in the program committee of several conferences including ETS and DATE. He has published more than 80 papers to various conferences and magazines.

Keynote Presentation Abstract

An apparently invisible revolution is crisscrossing the semiconductor industry developing components targeted to the automotive market. Until recent days, this industry usually behaved unadventurously, adopting technology and solution previously experimented by other industry applications. The sudden increase of the required performances pushed to the adoption of very advanced technology nodes.

We expect that all these will also have an impact on the methods and solutions applied during production test. The talk will develop some of the factors proposed in the remainder of this abstract together with other elements.

A very popular topic is functional safety (FuSa) whose requirements are nowadays pervading the majority of new designs. FuSa is indeed an innovative element of our industry essential to the actual development of autonomous driving. It is already a consolidated solution present in many safety applications including for example braking, steering and passive safety devices. Test engineer welcomed the introduction of FuSa. Many advanced testability features became part of the functionalities offered to the customer and therefore no more seen as overhead for the SoC implementation. Nonetheless, other criticalities and additional factors are present.

Two additional key factors, though not orthogonal each other, might drive changes to the traditional test practices:

The correlation of performances between functional activation and test is progressively loosening
Parametric variations linked with new advanced technologies like FdSOI and FinFET are breaching typical test paradigm (e.g. divide and conquer or implication test)

Finally, we shall concentrate on the role and the weight of assembly technologies. The complexity of packages needed by high-power digital SoC is huge if compared with consolidated packages used in automotive like QFPs. A combination of reliability pitfalls is implicit with advanced packages because of the mix of materials, processing technologies, mechanical and thermal factors they are featuring.

These are samples of the signs arising from the quiet revolution running in our SoCs for automotive, which will be further discussed along with possible implications with usual test steps at wafer, package and system level.