A test data collection facility at the Microelectronic Engineering Department of the Rochester Institute of Technology allows their semiconductor process engineering students to evaluate the quality of their designs and processing, manage yield improvements, and thoroughly analyze devices and processes from a statistical point of view. The students, who fabricate thousands of devices and circuits in their undergraduate years, have now a semi-automatic wafer level probing capability to collect, analyze, and correlate orders of magnitude more test data in the same amount of test time previously devoted to manual test procedures. Tedious re- connections to various test instruments for test changeovers are being replaced by a flexible matrix switching system. The quality of the design and fabrication processes can be determined only if appropriate metrics are obtained. The results of automatic testing for defects in density structures, devices, and circuits are considered in this laboratory and throughout the microelectronics curriculum.
