Data Becomes Key For Next-Gen Chips


Data has become vital to understanding the useful life of a semiconductor — and the knowledge gleaned is key to staying competitive beyond Moore’s Law. What's changed is a growing reliance earlier in the design cycle on multiple sources of data, including some from further right in the design-through-manufacturing flow. While this holistic approach may seem logical enough, the semiconduc... » read more

Using Fab Sensors To Reduce Auto Defects


The semiconductor manufacturing ecosystem has begun collaborating on ways to effectively use wafer data to meet the stringent quality and reliability requirements for automotive ICs. Silicon manufacturing companies are now leveraging equipment and inspection monitors to proactively identify impactful defects prior to electrical test. Using machine learning techniques, they combine the monitor ... » read more

Semiconductor Professionals On Working From Home


With most of the world still in lockdown, we thought we’d find out how different people in the semiconductor industry are dealing with the coronavirus. Carl Moore, Yield Management Specialist, yieldHUB How has Covid-19 affected your work life? Much of my work is remote, but Covid-19 affects in-person interactions with customers, which is always important. Video conferencing is critical in ... » read more

Challenges In Making Better Medical Sensors


Now that COVID-19 pandemic has desensitized us to telemedicine and more at-home health monitoring, the way we receive health care probably has changed for good. The no-touch thermometer and our personal pulse oximeter are not just coveted gadgets now. They have true clinical use in what may become a “point-of-use” system. Point of use means we don’t have to go to the clinic to get screene... » read more

Figuring Out Binary Datalog Formats Without A Specification


Being in the realm of semiconductor data with a wide range of customers, companies often throw interesting technical challenges at us. The most complex one so far this year is probably a request (OK, a requirement!) to interpret binary test datalog files so that they can then be analysed from our yieldHUB database system. The company provided us with little information on the actual binary form... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Fab tools and test KLA has announced the formation of a new business group for its Electronics, Packaging and Components (EPC) businesses. The new EPC group includes the ICOS, Orbotech and the SPTS Technologies organizations. The group will be headed by Oreste Donzella, KLA’s executive vice president. In 2018, KLA acquired Orbotech for $3.4 billion, a deal that included two organizations-... » read more

Cleaning Data For Final Test


John O’Donnell, CEO of yieldHUB, talks about why data integrity is so critical for final test, what can cause it to be less-than-perfect, what’s needed to improve the quality of that data, and how that impacts the overall yield in a fab. » read more

New Uses For Manufacturing Data


The semiconductor industry is becoming more reliant on data analytics to ensure that a chip will work as expected over its projected lifetime, but that data is frequently inconsistent or incomplete, and some of the most useful data is being hoarded by companies for competitive reasons. The volume of data is rising at each new process node, where there are simply more things to keep track of,... » read more

Home Analysis Of STDF Data


STDF data files can be very large, often tens of megabytes, sometimes over a gigabyte for a single file. When you’re working from home and only have a desktop tool for analysis, you’ll have to download the data first from your work network. Even if the files are compressed first, they are still large and many times you would be required to analyze dozens of data files to really understand a... » read more

5 Important Tips For Working With STDF


The STDF datalog format developed by Teradyne has become the de facto standard in datalog formats in the semiconductor industry as most modern ATE manufacturers support the format. Data processing of the STDF files often require reading the binary files and converting them to formats that are human-readable or for input into a database. It is also possible that the STDF file is converted to ATD... » read more

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