Each node of the product development life-cycle is very important and at the later end of this product development life-cycle is the semiconductor chip testing. The testing at this node is done to analyze the results for the given lots of semiconductor wafer and to assess if the yield is low or high, and to take the required actions. The bad lots will affect the yield and cause operational inefficiencies, directly hitting the bottom-line negatively.
What are the Challenges related to Semiconductor Yield Management and its Improvement?
With the rising competition in the semiconductor industry and the quest to save costs, every semiconductor company is looking for new avenues to stay competitive. One way of achieving it is to conduct semiconductor yield loss analysis that directly saves cost and help companies to bring their products to the market faster. The semiconductor yield management has a lot of challenges associated with it. One of the biggest challenges is to collect, manage, analyze and then understand the data that comes out at various stages of testing. The three main stages of wafer testing are
- E-Test or Wafer Acceptance Test (WAT)
- Wafer Sort Test
- Final Test
A great amount of data is produced in each of these steps and the challenge even increases when the supply chain is global and fragmented, and the data formats vary because of testers used by different vendors. In such a challenging environment semiconductor yield enhancement is no easy job and to do so, it requires a lot of efforts and time, making the engineers to lose focus from their core job related to operations. However, with the help of an end-to-end semiconductor yield improvement software, the engineers can easily manage, analyze and understand this data. Once the data is analyzed, the engineers can pinpoint the issues that is causing semiconductor yield loss.
Why Semiconductor Yield Management is Important?
Semiconductor yield management is now becoming an important task as the companies are becoming more and more critical about the product quality and reliability. An increase of 0.1% yield can translate into huge financial gains and similarly a yield loss of 0.1 can poorly affect the reputation of the company, resulting in loss of customer’s trust and dollars.
yieldWerx is one of the most powerful semiconductor yield management tools available in the market that comes with a comprehensive suite of analytics. yieldWerx powerful application gives the users the ability to drill-down reports, automate rules and manage the data archiving with simple clicks. The yieldWerx Enterprise module comes with a strong set of graphical tools that help you create charts and graphs that can be shown at various levels of the organization from the executive management to the engineers on the test floor.
An end-to-end semiconductor yield management software like yieldWerx helps you manage, understand and analyze your test data coming out of various nodes of your global supply chain. This data then can be used to do semiconductor yield loss analysis and also to plan actions that can improve yield and help to perform the root cause analysis in a systematic manner.