Standard Test Data Format

Standard Test Data Format (STDF) is a proprietary

file format A file format is a Computer standard, standard way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file. It specifies how bits are used to encode information in a digital storage medium. File formats may be either proprietary format, pr ...

for

semiconductor A semiconductor is a material with electrical conductivity between that of a conductor and an insulator. Its conductivity can be modified by adding impurities (" doping") to its crystal structure. When two regions with different doping level ...

test information originally developed by

Teradyne Teradyne, Inc. is an American automatic test equipment (ATE) designer and manufacturer based in North Reading, Massachusetts. Its high-profile customers include Samsung, Qualcomm, Intel, Analog Devices, Texas Instruments and IBM. History T ...

, but it is now a

de facto standard A ''de facto'' standard is a custom or convention that is commonly used even though its use is not required. is a Latin phrase (literally " of fact"), here meaning "in practice but not necessarily ordained by law" or "in practice or actuality, ...

widely used throughout the semiconductor industry. It is a commonly used format produced by

automatic test equipment Automatic test equipment or automated test equipment (ATE) is any apparatus that performs tests on a device, known as the device under test (DUT), equipment under test (EUT) or unit under test (UUT), using automation to quickly perform measure ...

(ATE) platforms from companies such as Cohu, Roos Instruments,

Advantest is a Japanese leading manufacturer of automatic test equipment (ATE) for the semiconductor industry, and a manufacturer of measuring instruments used in the design, production and maintenance of electronic systems including fiber optic and wi ...

, SPEA S.p.A, and others. STDF is a

binary Binary may refer to: Science and technology Mathematics * Binary number, a representation of numbers using only two values (0 and 1) for each digit * Binary function, a function that takes two arguments * Binary operation, a mathematical op ...

format, but can be converted either to an

ASCII ASCII ( ), an acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for representing a particular set of 95 (English language focused) printable character, printable and 33 control character, control c ...

format known as ATDF or to a tab delimited text file. Decoding the STDF variable length binary field data format to extract ASCII text is non-trivial as it involves a detailed comprehension of the STDF specification, the current (2007) version 4 specification being over 100 pages in length. Software tools exist for processing STDF generated files and performing

statistical analysis Statistical inference is the process of using data analysis to infer properties of an underlying probability distribution.Upton, G., Cook, I. (2008) ''Oxford Dictionary of Statistics'', OUP. . Inferential statistical analysis infers properties of ...

on a population of tested devices.
Reference: STDF Specifications V4
Computer file formats Hardware testing file formats {{tech-stub