The overall importance of costing does not need emphasising, since it is the responsibility of every vendor and OEM not to make a financial loss across their range of products. Microelectronic costs, however, may be difficult to assess, and may be based upon previous experience rather than on precise financial data relating to a new product. Within the theme of this text, namely testing, it would clearly be cheaper for an IC vendor not to test production wafers and finished ICs, and for an OEM not to test a final product; on the other hand it is clearly equally unacceptable to subject every manufactured product to lengthy exhaustive life tests.

Inspec keywords: integrated circuit testing; integrated circuit economics

Other keywords: VLSI testing

Subjects: Semiconductor integrated circuit design, layout, modelling and testing