Product category:
Design and Development Software
News Release from: Mentor Graphics UK | Subject: YieldAssist
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 02 November 2005
Diagnostic tool enhances semiconductor
yield
Mentor Graphics' YieldAssist diagnostic tool enhances semiconductor yield and expands the firm's Design-for-Test product portfolio and platform beyond classical test generation and defect detection.
With the ability to quickly and accurately identify and isolate yield-limiting defects, Mentor Graphics' YieldAssist diagnostic tool enhances semiconductor yield and expands the company's Design-for-Test (DFT) product portfolio and platform beyond classical test generation and defect detection The product takes failure information directly from manufacturing test, and through advanced diagnostics, identifies failure causes to facilitate yield learning and eliminate weeks of manual analysis effort
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 24 Oct 2006 at 8.00am (UK)
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Accurate diagnosis of scan test failures is a critical element of failure analysis, and is becoming vital for yield learning and yield improvement purposes as nanometre technologies continue to shrink.
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Failing devices from the wafer sort phase of manufacturing test can provide a goldmine of information for yield and failure analysis engineers.
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YieldAssist allows semiconductor manufacturers to harvest this information and identify both systematic and random defects to drive failure analysis and yield improvement.
It also provides a critical link back into the design process for improving design for manufacturability (DFM) as well as for adaptively improving the quality of the manufacturing test itself and reducing defect per million (DPM) rates.
The overall yield learning/monitoring strategy that YieldAssist facilitates addresses the three key areas needed for a complete solution: high quality test, effective defect isolation and rapid high-volume diagnosis.
Effective detection of all the subtle defects that occur in nanometre designs is the first step in yield improvement.
The high quality manufacturing tests created with the TestKompress or FastScan automatic test program generation (ATPG) tools provide the foundation for improving defect detection and diagnosis.
Using the failure data from manufacturing test, YieldAssist is able to isolate the cause of the failure and map it to defect suspects.
A link to Mentor's Calibre results viewing environment (RVE) allows users to view suspected defects in the physical design layout view to further isolate problems down to a physical feature.
Rapid high-volume diagnosis can be achieved in a production environment by directly reading failure logs from compressed test patterns.
This enables effective failure diagnosis directly from production test data, avoiding the additional cost of rerunning special tests for diagnosis purposes only.
"Failure analysis is a growing field where better tools can pay big dividends", said Robert Hum, Vice President and General Manager for the Design Verification and Test division at Mentor Graphics.
"There continues to be a need for diagnostic tools that can more finely classify suspect defects and rapidly link those suspected defects to the physical design for analysis".
"This groundbreaking advance in DFT technology will dramatically hasten silicon failure analysis and ultimately play a critical part in yield learning and yield monitoring".
YieldAssist is available immediately.
Pricing starts at US$126K per year for a term-based license.
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