Yokogawa Electric Corporation has developed the ST6730 Flat Panel Display (FPD) Driver IC Test System, which achieves high-speed multi-pin testing, and the AH9610 Auto-handler, which is designed for use with tape carrier and chip-on-film packages. Both products are being released onto the market today and will be exhibited at the SEMICON Japan 2004 trade show, which starts December 1 at the Makuhari Messe, near Tokyo.

Development Background
FPD driver IC production is increasing rapidly to keep up with steady growth in demand for information appliances such as mobile phones and LCD television sets. In addition, FPD panels are increasing in size and resolution. Consequently, today’s FPD driver ICs need to have single chip, multi-pin designs with widened tonal range, fast device interfaces, and reduced noise levels. The resulting longer test times has increased demand for high-performance systems capable of testing devices with 1,000 or more pins and data rates of 500 MHz or higher. On the other hand, the price of FPD driver ICs is coming down as the price of end products falls.

In response to these market needs, Yokogawa has aimed in its development of the ST6730 FPD driver test system and AH9610 auto-handler to cut testing costs in half while simultaneously achieving high performance and high throughput.

Features of the ST6730 Test System
1. World’s first per-pin digitizer
Dramatic increases in the speed (100 times faster than our previous model) and accuracy (3 times higher) of gray-scale testing* have been achieved by having analog/digital converters and memory elements for each pin and performing distributed processing by means of a computing unit equipped with multiple digital signal processors. The system can thus fully support the measurement of driver ICs designed for use in increasingly higher-definition flat panel televisions.
* Gray-scale testing: A test mode in which the output voltage of a driver IC is varied in 64,256 ways and all output pins are tested in order to define the display colors of an FPD. High-definition television is said to require 1,024 different output voltage levels.

2. Support of multi-pin, high-speed testing
While current mainstream driver ICs are in the 500 pin class, the ST6730 supports up to 1,344 pins with conventional ICs or up to 2,688 pins if used with Yokogawa MUX dual-channel switching ICs. In addition, with its maximum data rate of 750 MHz, this system is able to handle increasingly fast device-to-device signals.

Features of the AH9610 Auto-Handler
1. Simultaneous multi-device measurement
The AH9610 can simultaneously measure up to four devices, twice the number of earlier models.

2. Improved interface with peripheral equipment
While earlier models could only transfer measurement results in one direction to a PC via a serial interface, the LAN-enabled AH9610 can communicate in both directions with a PC. Furthermore, the increased memory capacity now allows the handler to store product lot information, in addition to the measurement results.

Major Target Markets
Manufacturers of FPD driver ICs for use with mobile phones, digital cameras, LCD televisions, etc.

Applications
ST6730: Wafer-level and final testing of FPD drivers
AH9610: Sorting of FPD drivers during final testing, in combination with the tester