Every decent semiconductor company has a system to track in real time the yield of the Fab’s products. Increasing the yield not only enhances directly the profit by using as many virgin wafers as possible, but also indirectly by saving time on mature products so that the engineer teams can focus on implementing new processes in the emerging markets. The yield is known to be the crucial factor when it comes to increasing both profit and growth of a semiconductor factory. Nevertheless, as discussed in the following, it is the toughest aspect to optimize.

The complexity of the production lines and processes along with the tools deviations induce unavoidable yield reduction. Improvements can always be made in upgrading the equipment and assembly lines. However, as the new products require higher tools precisions (following Moore’s law) and the wafers are getting wider (the 450 mm deployment is predicted to happen between 2018 and 2020), semiconductor toolsets are extremely expensive and can rarely be purchased below one million USD. Regarding the yield, these large investments along with the pricey maintenance won’t be absorbed before years and are mostly done for downsizing purposes.

So, what substantially more affordable strategy can be implemented to obtain a better and sustainable yield? Getting feedbacks from the production line through Statistical Process Control (SPC) is the key, tracking many parameters for each tool on each sector is the best way to identify why a yield reduction has been observed. Thus, a big and fast-compensated difference can be made at the detection level and enables to save days, weeks or even months in some cases to pinpoint the source of the problem.

But why should your yield system collect the data if you can’t even process it quickly and efficiently enough to provide a fast resolution strategy for the yield limitation you are facing? Are you even sure you are looking at the relevant parameters? The choice of investing in an efficient die and line yield management software such as yieldWerx Enterprise can largely boost-up the performances of your firm and bring high standards.

An effective yield software needs to point out as fast as possible the root causes of yield losses in order to straighten up the production in the minimal period of time. yieldWerx Enterprise software is based on many tools fully configurable with editing user’s profile and help you to keep the yield as close as possible to the ideal 100 % value. The advantage of using our product is to make clear reports and analysis of the yield in parallel for sites, devices and processes. The structure and features of yieldWerx Enterprise can adapt for a wide variety of applications, fitting without a doubt your company.

Considering these arguments, you certainly want to make sure that your Fab has access to the adequate yield management structure that yieldWerx Enterprise can bring by centralizing in a database the defect analysis and yield prediction.

So how do you recognize if your factory chose this approach? A few indications should quickly help you to find this out. Having access to the daily yield and yield trend is of course a must to have, yieldWerx Enterprise integrates 5 attractive features when it comes to this aspect.

Your software also needs to inform the correct person depending on why and when an alert was triggered so that the appropriate team in charge can quickly unlock the situation. You must easily receive the failing tests and bins, yieldWerx provides you clean bin histogram reports that can be

exported in many different formats. The fourth sign is to be able to visualise the yield uniformity across the wafers , with yieldWerx you can generate wafer report maps and quickly identify the locations of pass and failing dies along with their bin, count and percentage.

Finally, your self-perception should be the one of the most important signs : is your Fab experiencing sensitive yield fluctuations ? If yes, you might probably want to switch to a better yield interface and take the step of a 15 days free trial or schedule a demo for our product. Take the opportunity to level-up your Fab by bringing the tool that will guarantee stability and better profits for the future!