Agilent Technologies has announced a formal agreement with Core Wafer Systems (CWS) for the semiconductor test market space.

Agilent Technologies has announced a formal agreement with Core Wafer Systems (CWS), a leading provider of accelerated and long-term reliability test solutions and analysis tools for the semiconductor test market space. The Advanced Scaleable Unified Reliability (ASUR) suite of solutions from CWS exclusively uses Agilent's system tester and instruments for the Single Device Reliability (SDR) and multi-site Parallel Device Reliability (PDR) test products. ASUR includes fifth-generation PDQ-WLR, the accelerated reliability standard in the test industry offered by Agilent since 1994.

Complementing the testing methodology is the Reliability Data Analyser (RDA) software from CWS for real-time, post-test analysis and lifetime prediction for devices, metallisation and dielectrics.

As part of the agreement, Agilent offers CWS software reliability solutions, services and test structure libraries, which are uniquely compatible with Agilent hardware.

Agilent will sell a turnkey solution and support the integrated software and hardware as a single source vendor for reliability customers.

'CWS' software reliability test solutions are a natural extension to the reliability solutions already supported by the Agilent B1500A semiconductor device analyser and the Agilent 4070 series of parametric testers,' said Minoru Ebihara, vice president and general manager of Agilent Hachioji Semiconductor Test Division.

'Now we can offer a complete range of semiconductor reliability test solutions, from instruments to systems, and the modular nature of our approach makes it easy and cost-effective for our customers to start small and add later to their reliability test capabilities as their needs change'.

'We are pleased to continue and expand our partnership with such an established and well-respected leader in the industry,' said Roger Goetz, CEO, Core Wafer Systems.

'This alliance with Agilent will allow us to further expand our reach to the worldwide customer base'.

'Now all customers will have convenient access to these advanced tools, which will help them increase efficiency and lower their overall cost-of-test at the deep nanometer scale'.

Core Wafer Systems (CWS) specialises in single-site and multi-site (parallel) accelerated and long-term reliability testing and analysis, and provides modular wafer-level and package-level solutions for current and emerging technologies.