DFT Digest

It was a grueling interview (not!). My prospective manager sat me down in front of his desk, looked at my resume, which contained a summary of my classwork to date (I was up for an intern position), looked up and asked, “Do you like hardware or software better?”

“Both, I guess. I’d say 50-50″, was my reply. Pretty crappy, non-committing answer in retrospect. But I’ll cut myself some slack, it was the first job interview of this 23 year-long so-called career. I didn’t need the technical interviewing skills again for 7-8 more years.

The manager got up and said, “Great! Let me introduce you to Howard over here, he’ll take you to the test floor”. A one question interview!

The test floor was a strange, wonderful place back then. Filled with an assortment of gadgets and gizmos I’d never seen before.  Howard ignored most of it, and led me over to the Fairchild Sentry 20/21 testers, and said “This is what we work on”. It was a big computer, with a mag-tape drive, and a bundle of wires leading to a mounted box, about 2 feet square on its face, and a smaller box with buttons and lights set on top of the mounting frame. A desk with a Hazeltine computer monitor (with built-in keyboard) sat next to the mounted box, called the ‘test head’.

Wow, a hundred years ago… 2-3micron nmos technology, maybe thousands of transistors stuffed into 8 and 16-pin DIP packages. Functional tests, ones and zeros crafted by hand or clever text editing.

I walked onto a test floor a couple of weeks ago, and ran into an old test engineering acquaintance of mine. He was working on a Teradyne Flex system. I looked at the the desk and saw slick graphics and spreadsheets sprawled out across two monitors. An oddly familiar look to it… “It’s Windows XP!”, he said with a grin.

Ahh yes, the ATE world has evolved into an upright position - you can now play Freecell while waiting for your test to run!