Remote Laboratory for Testing Microelectronic Circuits on Silicon Wafers under a Microscope

Aaron Mohtar, Zorica Nedic and Jan Machotka

Over the last decade, there has been a move towards using remote laboratories in engineering education. The majority of these laboratories are static, involving limited user controlled mechanical movements. The University of South Australia has developed one such laboratory, NetLab that has been successfully utilized for both on-campus and off-shore teaching of electrical and electronics engineering students. Following this success, we are now developing a remote laboratory for microelectronic fabrication. The first stage of the development is the remote laboratory for testing electronic circuits directly on the silicon wafer under a microscope which is normally conducted in a cleanroom. The major challenge of this project is the requirement of micro-probes to be accurately positioned over the internet. This paper presents the development of this new remote laboratory with a carefully designed graphical user interface for a reliable and stable user control of the microprobe movements.

Low Cost Remote Lab for Microcontrollers: WebLab-DEUSTO-PIC

Javier García-Zubia, Ignacio Angulo, Unai Hernandez and Pablo Orduña

This paper describes how to design and to implement a remote laboratory under a new architecture which principal characteristics are that the main server disappears and that it is based on low cost microservers. The final architecture is thin and cost effective, and allows a simple installation in other universities. The paper presents the implementation of the WebLab-DEUSTO-PIC under this new architecture and the results obtained of its deployment in a real subject during the second semester of the second year of the Telecommunications Engineering at the University of Deusto: Digital Electronic Systems.

An SDRAM test education package that embeds the factory equipment into the e-learning server

J. M. Martins Ferreira and Ana Leao

SDRAM (Synchronous Dynamic Random Access Memory) demand has grown exponentially since the 1980s, as a result of technological factors and new areas of application. SDRAMs represented in 2007 c. 20% of the total semiconductor business and are a strategic area in the western and far-eastern economic communities. SDRAM test education is therefore an important subject, but very high purchase and maintenance costs keep test equipment beyond reach of most universities. This paper presents a pilot project developed jointly by Qimonda and the University of Porto (FEUP), where the company offers remote access to one if its Advantest SDRAM production testers. Access to this ATE was embedded into a Moodle e-learning server that supports a new course entitled Electronic Systems Testing, belonging to an Integrated Masters degree offered at FEUP. The excellent feedback received from students encouraged us to extend this cooperation into an educational network, which is also introduced in this paper.