STDF Background

No doubt you are familiar with the STDF datalog and perhaps even a bit frustrated. You are here, after all, reading this brief text. Despite some challenges it can cause, the standard was designed with great care and with expertise of many product and ATE test engineers. If is flexible to accommodate even todays very high speed, high pincount, mixed signal devices. Nothing to scoff at considering that the standard was designed some ten years ago. It doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon, as some of the finest state of the art testers are committed to support it. Agilent's 93000 and Teradyne's Catalyst are just two testers, rather well known I might add, that generate STDF datalogs.

What about XML? Will it replace the venerable STDF? The beauty in design of STDF is that it's not only flexible but it produces extremely compact datalog files. It is easily one of the most compressed forms of test data known to date. As the complexity of silicon expands, so does the volume of data that describes its performance. A practical advantage, quite possibly sufficient by itself, to secure the STDF well into the future. The emerging application of Design for Test may prove to be an excellent ATE innovation, however, it may be of practical value in a limited classes of products.

Paul Kaiser.