Centaur Technology: In-house Processor Testing Facility

Centaur's large incubation chambers have been specially designed for their in-house testing program. There are four units each of which take a batch of processors and apply heat to them while they are under load.

Image 1: Burn-in oven	Image 2: Showing a custom designed burn-in board

Image 2 shows a custom designed burn-in board. This board will have the processors mounted on it before being placed into the oven.

Image 3: New burn-in boards for 150 watt

In the close up of the new Centaur burn-in boards, which are more advanced than previous versions and have TEC heating/cooling elements as well as liquid cooling (Image 3), you can clearly see the small heatsinks and sockets the board contains.

Image 4: The boards being placed into the oven

Image 4 shows the board being inserted into one of the incubation chambers for burn-in. The complete burn-in process can take anywhere from 5 to 40 hours depending on what tests are being run.

Image 5: Exposing the die wafer

Elizabeth Tillman runs Centaur's manual assembly of chip onto package (Centaur out-sources fabrication of the Isaiah die to Fujitsu). Image 5 shows Elizabeth revealing the dies, which are identified and logged by their position on the wafer.

Image 6: Loading the die onto the Finetech machine

To assemble the chips, dies are loaded into an arm on the Finetech machine that holds the die in place (Image 6).

Image 7: Positioning the package under the die	Image 8: Lining up the wires on the die

The machine then positions the package under the die. By looking at the screens to her right (Image 8) Elizabeth manually lines up the wires on the die with the solder balls on the package. Once she gets all of the 1,577 solder balls and pins lined up she engages the machine to apply heat to the package and melt the solder to the die wires. Watching the process, you can see the moment the solder hits its melting point and the processor die "sits down" onto the package.

Image 9: Automated testing machine

At this point, the chips are taken away to be sealed - sealant goes around the edge of the die to further bond the die to the substrate and prevent it from becoming dislodged or having dirt find its way between the two. After sealing, the processors are transferred to an automated testing machine - the Seiko-Epson handler. This machine has a mechanism inside that picks up the processors, drops them into a socket, where a series of tests are run on the parts. The machine then places the processors into groups (or bins) based on certain specifications that have been pre-programmed. At this stage, the processors are essentially being tested only for shorts and other anomalies in the packaging process.

Image 10: Testing systems

Further testing (or "speed-binning") is then performed. The testing systems can vary the clock speed of the processor while running a specific payload and while altering the front side bus and CPU clock ratio. To top it off, the entire time this is going on the testing systems are adjusting the voltage and temperature. This enables Centaur to quality-check the processors and determine what sort of yields they're getting out of the test wafers.

Image 11: A bin of Isaiah chips

Finally, Image 11 shows a finished bin of Isaiah processors.  While obviously, production processor fabrication would all be done in a clean-room, Centaur's innovative in-house burn-in, assembly and testing facility is part of the reason for its world-leading design cycle timeframe.