For our "prototype", the team began developing methodology of how to test wafers using consistent testing practices. The team met up to discuss which areas of the wafers were necessary to test and which areas might lead to readings which are not necessary. Some of the tiles on each wafer are not manufactured with processes that give a reading within the range which benefits our research. Readings that contain a resistance, rather than a short or an open, are considered good and everything else is considered bad and not saved to analyze.

Next in the process of developing and refining the testing, we spoke with our sponsor to ensure that we were gathering the correct information and data. The sponsor let us know that we should be saving not only the good cell locations, but also wanted to know which cells were bad. This would allow the sponsor to be able to tell what happened during manufacturing and where on the silicon wafer there are consistently bad readings.

The next step in the process was to try to make the testing process less tedious by making the naming convention of the data to be saved more automated. This meant that the team needed to learn about how the SMU saves files and names them, and which variables could be used to automate that process. It turned out that the SMU has a counter which increments every time we take a reading, and we can use this to tell which cell we are currently testing. This makes the entire process much simpler because for each 32x32 array we are testing we will not need to count to check which cell we are currently on.

To make the data collection a bit neater, we developed an excel spreadsheet which correlated the readings we were taking to the exact tile that we were on. The tiles which had a larger amount of good readings were greener and the tiles which had a very small amount of good readings were red. This allowed us to easily visualize which spots on the wafers contained more good readings to be able to test more efficiently on other wafers.

The final step in our prototyping was to send all of the data to our sponsor to analyze and ensure that the data we had collected was saved properly. The sponsor then analyzed the data and gave the information to his team of manufacturers and began developing the next batch of wafers.