1. Purpose of the gate
First silicon on the tester marks the arrival of first wafers or parts and the start of program debug, with the team, tester time and bench equipment ready.
It is a readiness check more than a review of results, aimed at making the first days of silicon productive.
First wafers or packaged parts arrive and start testing, with the debug team, the tester time and the bench equipment ready.
The first days of silicon set the pace for everything after them. A team that can tell within hours whether a failure follows the part, the site, the hardware set or the tester will reach correlation far sooner than one that debates each failure from scratch. This is why the review spends its time on allocation, data and decision rights rather than on results, which do not exist yet.
It is also the point to agree what counts as a silicon issue. Raising a suspected design problem too early wastes design time; raising it too late wastes the window in which a revision can still be planned. A simple rule, such as a failure that repeats on two testers and the bench, keeps the two teams aligned.
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