1. Purpose and scope
Every chip that ships must be tested, and the package must protect the die, connect it to the board, carry its power and remove its heat. This stage takes the first wafers, tests them at wafer level, assembles good dies into packages, tests the packaged parts and supplies them to bring-up. In parallel, the test program is debugged, its limits set and its coverage confirmed, so that it can later be approved for production.
The stage starts at first silicon and closes at the First packaged parts tested gate, once the first parts are assembled in their package and the test program runs on them. Its results then feed the engineering samples gate and, later, production release, where the test program must be released. The test program release marker shows when the production test program is approved for use.
Scope includes the package design built earlier, wafer sort and final test flows, test hardware, the test program and its correlation across testers and sites, the format and storage of test data, and the build of packaged parts for the lab and for samples.
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