Advanced Burn-In - An Optimized Product Stress and Test Flow for Automotive Microcontrollers

Burn-In (BI) stress to screen out early life failures caused by latent defects has become a quality requirement for automotive microcontrollers. However, as feature size continues to scale down, performing BI stress on packaged parts has started to run into challenges including increased risks of thermal runaway and overstress, together with continuously increased cost and cycle time. A more effective and efficient product stress and test flow to achieve better quality with less cost, namely, Advanced Burn-In (ABI), is presented in this paper. With enhanced wafer level stress and test, as well as enhanced Advanced Outlier Limit (AOL) algorithms, ABI enables us to eliminate package BI on majority of parts on each wafer while improving quality at the same time. It has been successfully implemented on automotive products at NXP with superb quality at PPB (defective Parts-Per-Billion) level.