Measurement Automation, Archival Storage, and Quality Control
The SPPDG laboratory records thousands of measurements every year. It is critically important that all measurements be documented well enough that they can be repeated and verified, and also that they can be retrieved and understood many years after the tests have been completed. It is invaluable to many research programs to compare and contrast measurements from different technologies or different generations of similar technologies.
To support uniform quality and long term archival storage, SPPDG staff have written a number of specialty measurement control and data analysis programs that acquire the data automatically from a large number of instruments. The measurement software records data, instrument parameters, device identification, descriptive text, operator information and even environmental conditions in a well structured data hierarchy.
In addition to the measurement data, the devices themselves are catalogued and stored in nitrogen-purged electrostatic discharge-protected cabinets. If the need arises, it is possible to locate and remeasure the exact devices that were analyzed for most of the SPPDG research projects. Occasionally our sponsors request a remeasurement or new measurements many years after the original project has ended, and in general we are capable of supporting such requests.
The quality of the measurements is assured through the use of verification structures incorporated directly into many of the designs, along with "gold standard" verification components that are tracked over time. Virtually all equipment is calibrated in-house by third-party equipment suppliers on a yearly basis, with full National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) traceability.
Verification test sites on a mulitchip module test structure.
