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By Ben Savage Ben's Blog February 28, 2021

In this blog i would like to discuss one of our service offerings which is the upscreening of semiconductor devices.

For those of you unfamiliar with upscreening it is in short the act of functionally verifying a device functions to a higher specification level than originally outlined by the OEM. This is made possible via multiple factors including the fact that OEMs often use the same die and packages across Commercial, Industrial and Military temperature ranges and produce far more Commercial/Industrial units as the market demand is far higher.

As the more specialist grade semiconductors come to their end of life or become obsolete the lower graded products are often still commercially available for reasons mentioned above. Upscreening these Commercial or Industrial parts to eleviated temperature ranges or environmental specification offers a viable, cost effective and sustainable solution (depending on base material availability).

Common scenarios in which up-screening may be warranted include:

– An obsolete device is required to repair or continue a legacy application however is no longer available and upscreening becomes a viable solution as the lower grade base material is available.

– A customer is looking to use a COTS (Commercially Off-The-Shelf) item however needs assurance of enhanced performance and/or environmental tolerance.

– The customer wishes to weed out marginal product via burn-in to help ensure long term application reliability.

– A design issue is present that requires a product to be characterised to specific set of values prior to use.

Force hold a large library of test programs built up over the past 25 years that give us excellent test coverage over a wide range of semiconductor devices. In the event we have not tested the device in question before we can design and create the software/hardware required to offer a comprehensive functional upscreen. All donor parts are subject to the rigorous Force Technologies Goods Inward Inspection Process an AS6081A/C inspection/test or are procured from franchised distribution.

Ben Savage / About Author
Ben Savage joined Force back in 2006, starting out as a technician and now holds the title of Application Manager. Boasting over 17 years living and breathing Obsolete semiconductors, his day-to-day role is heading up the daily engineering requirements that get sent in from our global customer base. Ben holds Member level with IIOM (The Institute of obsolescence management) and has written and presented numerous presentations/blogs over the years detailing Force products/services and new technologies. He enjoys the many challenges the semiconductor obsolescence industry and splits time between expanding our engineering capabilities/services and ensuring suitable form fit and function customer solutions are achieved.

When not working, Ben can be found spending time with his wife, two children and various hobbies.
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