We have decided to assign a special edition of our yearly MOCCA (MOst Creative Customer Award), to appreciate the long-term cooperation with Andreas Kux and Volker Pissors from Infineon.

Tamás Kerekes comments the award:
“Andreas and Volker are retiring. We have worked together on many challenging projects for over more than 25 years. We were not just their suppliers, and they were not only just our customers: we were a team striving to achieve results.
We achieved such results, spending days and sometimes nights in the laboratory. Andreas surely remembers when we demonstrated a sotiware bug by shorting a resistor deeply inside a climatic chamber. Volker might never forget how a tiny FPGA timing error caused unexplainable array content.
Over these 25 years, I have learnt a lot from Andreas and from Volker. And what I have learnt today is inside our TESTMESH, NanoCycler and BarnieMAT products. Andreas, Volker, thanks for your cooperation. I am looking forward to staying in touch with you. Our business relationship might be ending, but our friendship will remain.”

Dr. Volker Pissors, adds:

“Episode 1 – before Qimonda

My career at INFINEON started mid of 2000 – first as product engineer for wireless chips. In 2001 I have got the chance to join a young development team working on a new NAND and NOR compatible technology.

Looking for a flexible and easy to use ATE for NVM devices we found the RIFLE. The first device under test was a tiny NVM array implementing the base macro of the targeted NAND and NOR compatible products. Testing this macro on the RIFLE we learned a lot about this new NVM technology called NROM.

In the next development phase, we used the RIFLE also for first characterization and reliability tests. The included RIFLE software tools accelerated the engineering work a lot (plot distributions, digital and analogue bitmaps, fail bit addresses, etc.).

Episode 2 – Qimonda

At Qimonda, a memory spin-off of INFINEON, we used the RIFLE SE (second edition) for characterizing new MLC NAND macros. The extended digital control capabilities of the RIFLE SE enabled the operation control of this macro (read, erase and multilevel program).

Finally, the first 16Gbit NAND product of Qimonda was characterized using RIFLE SE in 2007. The filtering engine of the BarnieMAT tool have been co-developed in 2007. Still a powerful feature of BarnieMAT today.

Episode 3 – today

Today the collaboration is focused on data analysis using BarnieMAT (see MOCCA 2019).

Episode 4 – the future

My successors will look for new engineering test equipment – a new and great opportunity for a NplusT hardware revival at INFINEON!”

Dr. Andreas Kux also shares:
“After starting at INFINEON 1995 in the development of EEPROM for chipcard application I am sharing a lot of the path and episodes as described by Volker Pissors. Focus on my side was geting products ready for qualification and – especially in NAND development – supporting that
from the very early stages of development.
Key points in the first phase of working with NplusT (episodes 1&2) were

• RIFLE as bench tester for NROM technology was available on quite a number of product engineering workplaces coming with software for immediate visibility of results supporting low cycle time in analyses;
• Increased use of analysis features was leading to the approach to make bitmap tooling available also offline as part of Barnie package;
• NAND multi-level visualization was defined and implemented together with NplusT.

When I started to work for INFINEON automotive microcontrollers there was an already existing link to NplusT based on a RIFLE SE test system. The software part was revived and extended in two major steps (episode 3).

• The starting point for using Barnie was providing a unique base for bitmapping in FAR handling for a wide range of products;
• Since then colleagues took over expanding the use of Barnie not only for analysis but also linked to production data (see MOCCA 2019).”