1. Purpose and scope
While the chip is in the fab, the test team has a window to build and prove the program. Writing it now, and running it on the tester with the real hardware and a reference or loopback, means first silicon tests the chip rather than the program, and the first days of silicon are spent on real issues.
The stage covers program generation from the specification, test method development, offline checks and simulation, and the tester run. It ends when the program is ready for silicon: it loads, runs end to end, bins as expected, and is under revision control with release notes.
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