Low Cost High Temperature Test System for SOI Devices

Abstract

Silicon on Insulator technology has found widespread use in high temperature electronic applications in the automotive, aerospace and oil well logging industries. To ensure the integrity and reliability of these devices in their applications, a major challenge is to be able to test the devices, economically, under similar operating conditions to those they would experience in the field, that is in operating temperatures of around 300C. Furthermore, due to the criticality of the applications it is also necessary to perform stress testing to identify potentially weak devices before they are used in the field. Several companies now produce ‘dynamic burn-in’ systems, however, these are very expensive. Consequently, there is a need for the development of low cost bench top high temperature test systems which can be used for high temperature testing of prototype devices to be used in ‘harsh environments'.