The use of bare dice on flight hardware enables designers to use the most advanced integrated circuit (IC) technologies in the smallest possible footprint. The only way to get the dice affordably is to buy them the way industry does-as untested material. This requires designers of high reliability hardware to find inexpensive, quick turn-around, and straightforward strategies for testing the dice and assembling them onto boards. Having known good dice is especially important for complex designs or expensive parts, with high numbers of interconnections where rework would be expensive. It is even more important when the part requires programming at the field level.

In the drive to exploit the benefits of using bare dice, a method for testing the dice prior to their integration into flight hardware is required. The Snapstrate was designed to provide a cost-effective vehicle for testing bare dice and producing Known Good Die.