Liquid cooling option STR provides SLT and BI solution for HPC, AI and automotive devices
Davette Berry, sr. director of business development for Advantest, discusses the expansion of the company’s 7038 System-Level Test Platform, with right-sized single test rack solution for high volume manufacturing. The new liquid-cooling enabled system delivers affordable, high-density SLT and burn-in test for high-demand, lower-volume HPC, AI, and automotive devices. Davette also looks forward to Advantest’s presence at SEMICON West and also shares some insights as to what will be keeping the company busy over the coming months
In the relentless push toward higher computational performance, semiconductor testing has become as much about managing heat, data, and design complexity as it is about validating functionality. As processors and system-on-chips (SoCs) become denser and more heterogeneous, traditional testing methodologies face new limits. Advantest’s latest evolution of its system-level test (SLT) platform - the TAS 7038 Single Test Rack (STR) - is a direct response to those limits, providing a compact, thermally advanced, and fully integrated solution designed to meet the changing demands of AI, automotive, and high-performance computing (HPC) devices.
Announced earlier this year, the 7038 STR extends the established 7038 family of SLT systems with a right-sized, liquid-cooled configuration that bridges the gap between engineering development and mid-volume production. In doing so, Advantest is addressing a crucial segment of the market - where unit volumes may not rival mobile processors, but performance and power density are increasing exponentially.
Evolving the system-level test platform
The 7038 platform has long served as the cornerstone of Advantest’s SLT offering. It combines mechanical handling, electrical interface, and thermal management in a single integrated system. The newest addition - the single test rack variant - derives from the dual-rack architecture that underpins Advantest’s high-volume production systems but reimagines it for customers whose production scales are smaller and whose devices push the limits of power and thermal design.
“The platform integrates a chip handler, an elevator, and a multi-slot rack,” explains Davette Berry. “Each slot is a standalone system-level tester. The single test rack version is effectively a smaller derivative of our dual-rack system, with one elevator instead of two. It’s the same DNA - just in a more compact footprint.”
That smaller footprint carries significant implications. By maintaining full compatibility with the larger 7038 systems while streamlining size and complexity, Advantest enables customers to align their test infrastructure with evolving production needs. Automotive and computing customers, for instance, may run tens or hundreds of thousands of units per month—volumes that don’t justify the highest-throughput configurations used in smartphone SoC production, but which demand the same precision and environmental control.
Liquid cooling: meeting the thermal challenge
While the physical configuration may have shrunk, the power profiles of devices under test have not. If anything, they’ve grown dramatically. The increasing computational density of AI and HPC processors, combined with advanced packaging techniques such as 2.5D and 3D integration, is concentrating heat generation into smaller areas of silicon. Traditional air cooling, long the mainstay of test and validation environments, is fast becoming inadequate.
“The biggest addition is the combination of air and liquid cooling,” says Davette. “Liquid cooling existed in our larger footprint systems, but the 7038 STR now integrates it directly into a smaller test rack. In system-level testing, devices are exercised to their extremes - they’re running full workloads, and they get hot. The liquid cooling integration allows active thermal control so the logic can get hot enough to operate properly, but not overheat.”
The comparison to data centres is apt. Just as hyperscale servers have shifted to direct-to-chip liquid cooling to manage soaring thermal loads, test systems are now following suit. The physics are the same: higher power density, unevenly distributed hotspots, and rising ambient temperatures make precision thermal management indispensable.
“Data centres and automotive processors have already moved beyond pure air circulation,” Advantest’s expert notes. “In test mode, the stress on the device is even greater. We’re replicating real-world workloads, often pushing chips beyond nominal operating conditions to ensure reliability. That’s why liquid cooling isn’t just a luxury—it’s a requirement.”
The result is a system that can support significantly higher power envelopes, opening the door to testing the latest generation of AI accelerators, automotive compute platforms, and edge processors without throttling or compromising throughput.
A turnkey, single-vendor solution
Beyond thermal engineering, the 7038 STR embodies a holistic approach to automation and integration. In a production environment, efficiency hinges on more than just throughput; it depends on the seamless interaction of mechanical, electrical, and software subsystems. That’s where Advantest’s “single-vendor turnkey solution” comes into play.
“System-level testing is inherently complex,” Davette Berry explains. “You’re loading a chip onto an application board, running native software, and validating real-world functionality. But to achieve high utilisation and throughput, you need to optimise across multiple engineering disciplines simultaneously - electrical integrity, mechanical stability, thermal dissipation, and factory automation.”
By consolidating these competencies within a single platform, Advantest relieves customers of the burden of system integration. The turnkey approach means that the handler, tester, software, and support infrastructure all originate from one source - and, crucially, are designed to work together from the outset. This reduces both the time and risk associated with deployment while ensuring consistent data integrity and tool uptime across production sites.
“That’s what makes these systems financially achievable and operationally efficient,” Davette says. “It’s about aligning the test floor ecosystem - hardware, software, data, and service - into a coherent whole.”
Optimised for the mid-volume market
Historically, Advantest’s system-level test expertise has been most visible in ultra-high-volume environments such as mobile applications processors. Those systems, produced in the hundreds of millions, demanded the dual-rack, high-parallelism version of the 7038 platform. However, as new segments - particularly automotive and HPC - rise in prominence, a different set of constraints and requirements has emerged.
“Automotive and high-performance compute devices are much more complex,” Davette notes. “They’re thermally demanding, they draw more power, and the units shipped per month are lower. The single test rack is right-sized for that market - perfect for tens or hundreds of thousands of devices per month, not hundreds of millions.”
This right-sizing doesn’t mean compromising capability. The STR retains full compatibility with the broader 7038 family, ensuring that hardware, software, and thermal infrastructure can be interchanged across configurations. The modular architecture means that as a customer’s production scales, their test investment remains protected.
“The beauty of the 7038 architecture,” Davette explains, “is that every slot in the system is a standalone tester, and the components are interchangeable between the engineering station, single test rack, and dual test rack. Electrically, thermally, and from a software perspective, they’re identical - the difference is automation level. So if a customer’s volume grows, they can migrate the same test content to a dual test rack for higher parallelism, or back to a single rack for pilot runs or engineering.”
This modularity reflects a central principle of Advantest’s platform design: scalability without reinvention. Customers can start small, iterate, and expand seamlessly, all within a unified ecosystem.
Activate 360: software for a data-driven test future
Hardware is only half the equation. As test environments become more integrated into digital manufacturing ecosystems, software increasingly determines how effectively those systems perform. Advantest’s new Activate 360 software suite represents a complete rethinking of the company’s test management stack, extending three decades of Activate software heritage into a modern, AI-ready architecture.
“Activate 360 includes four major components,” Davette explains. “Facility 360 manages communication with the factory network, exchanging data about tester status and performance. Cell 360 handles the pass/fail binning and recipe coordination between the tester and the handler. Studio 360 is our integrated development environment for test program generation. And the newest piece - Device 360 - serves as the software interface between the customer’s device and our test environment.”
Device 360, in particular, reflects the increasing diversity of devices being tested. System-level testing of a smartphone SoC bears little resemblance to that of an AI accelerator or an automotive compute platform. Each device brings unique firmware, power profiles, and functional modes. Device 360 abstracts this variability, allowing customers to run their native application suites within the Advantest framework.
“In system-level testing, every customer’s device behaves differently,” says Davette. “Device 360 allows them to bring their own software environment while we manage the reliability, throughput, and data integrity that production demands.”
The broader Activate 360 environment also lays the groundwork for a future where test data becomes an active asset. As part of Advantest’s ongoing push toward cloud integration and analytics-driven optimisation, the suite is designed to facilitate real-time data exchange between test floors and higher-level enterprise systems.
From test to insight: AI and the cloud
As the semiconductor industry races to design and produce chips that enable artificial intelligence, it is also turning to AI to improve its own processes. At last year’s Semicon West, Advantest showcased precisely that duality: using AI-powered analytics to enhance test efficiency and yield, even as it tests AI processors themselves.
“The data generated by our testers and handlers is extremely valuable,” Davette explains. “With the right infrastructure, that data can be used to accelerate time-to-market, improve yields, and optimise test costs. We’re highlighting our cloud-based data solutions that enable real-time data flow from the tester into analytic environments.”
By enabling actionable insights - such as predictive maintenance, adaptive test optimisation, and yield learning - Advantest’s data infrastructure closes the loop between design, test, and production. Machine learning algorithms can identify patterns in device behaviour, suggest process adjustments, and continuously improve both throughput and test coverage.
In parallel, the company’s Silicon Validation Group demonstrated Psychonic, a toolset aimed at accelerating the transition from first silicon to high-volume ramp. The collaboration between this group and the SLT division ensures test pattern portability between silicon validation and production environments - a critical capability for today’s complex, multi-die devices.
“Advantest is uniquely positioned across the entire test lifecycle,” Davette says. “From design validation through system-level testing to production optimisation, we’re making sure that data, test content, and infrastructure remain actionable and interoperable.”
Looking ahead: co-packaged optics and the next frontier
As semiconductor architectures continue to evolve, Advantest sees a new class of challenges on the horizon - particularly around co-packaged optics (CPO) and silicon photonics. These technologies promise to overcome electrical interconnect bottlenecks by bringing optical communication directly into the package, dramatically increasing bandwidth while reducing power consumption. However, they also introduce an entirely new dimension of test complexity.
“In order to keep up with Moore’s Law, data transfer to computational engines will increasingly move through light rather than electrical pathways,” Davette notes. “Incorporating optical interfaces into the package changes everything. You now have to manage the mechanical alignment of optical engines, deal with nonlinearities in light transmission as the device heats up, and integrate that into high-uptime, turnkey test solutions.”
For test engineers, this means mastering a convergence of mechanical precision, optical alignment, and thermal control that far exceeds anything seen in traditional electrical test environments. Advantest’s long-standing emphasis on multi-disciplinary integration - combining thermal, electrical, and mechanical expertise - positions it well to take on this challenge.
But before co-packaged optics reach production-scale volumes, there are more immediate concerns to tackle. Devices are growing larger, heavier, and hotter, challenging the robotics and JEDEC transport mechanisms that move parts through the back-end flow. The next generation of SLT equipment will need to accommodate these physical and thermal realities while continuing to deliver higher power and improved cooling.
“In the near term,” says Davette, “we’re focused on supporting larger, higher-power devices and improving the robotics that handle them. That’s happening now. Longer-term, co-packaged optics will drive the next wave of test innovation.”
The road ahead
From its origins in mobile SoC testing to its expanding role in automotive and AI device qualification, Advantest’s 7038 platform embodies the evolution of system-level test from a niche capability into a cornerstone of semiconductor manufacturing. The introduction of the 7038 STR extends that evolution, offering a flexible, thermally robust platform that meets the needs of a rapidly diversifying market.
Whether it’s liquid-cooled thermal management, modular scalability, or data-driven software integration, the STR represents more than an incremental update - it’s a statement of direction. In an era defined by AI, heterogeneous integration, and exponential data generation, system-level test is no longer an afterthought; it’s an enabler of performance, reliability, and time-to-market.
As Advantest prepares for the next wave - co-packaged optics, photonics, and beyond - it is clear that the company views system-level testing not just as a validation step, but as a strategic pillar in the semiconductor lifecycle. In doing so, it continues to bridge the gap between silicon and systems, between test data and actionable insight, and between today’s challenges and tomorrow’s possibilities.
