Leading ATE, EDA and Semiconductor Companies to Address Datalog Bottleneck in Yield Analysis
(Interviews, 11 Jul 2007 )
The STDF Fail Data Standardization Group is holding an open meeting at SEMICON West on July 17 to review progress on the working group's effort to develop a standard format to enable easy sharing of structural fail information for manufacturing yield analysis. The Group, comprised of representatives from leading automatic test equipment (ATE) and electronic design automation (EDA) providers, along with several of the world's largest semiconductor manufacturers, was started after meetings initiated by Verigy beginning at SEMICON West in July 2006. It recently added IBM, Texas Instruments and Advantest to its growing list of participating companies. The Group is targeting initial internal test trials of the standard this fall, with a Beta site evaluation program planned for late 2007.
"As a group, we recognize that in order to identify yield-reducing failures, it is now necessary to standardize how failure data is transmitted between ATE and EDA tools," said Group Chairman Ajay Khoche, who is Verigy's EDA/DFT Alliance Manager. "By working together, we will be able to fill a critical requirement that is emerging at 65nm and will only increase with each smaller process technology."
"The impressive speed of the standardization process is further proof that there is a clear benefit for all the companies involved," adds Andreas Leininger, Vice-Chairman of the logic device working group and senior staff engineer, Test Resource Partitioning, Infineon Technologies. "The standard is important for reducing integration efforts of advanced test solutions in complex environments, and employing partnerships in design, manufacturing and test."
At 65nm process technologies and beyond, collecting and analyzing structural fail information in volume production is imperative for yield improvements. Structural test techniques exist to collect the necessary data during manufacturing test. But to date, there has not been a widely adopted, efficient standard format for storing and exchanging the structural fail data between test and design for yield analysis. The lack of a standard data storage format is further complicated by the fact that the typical semiconductor manufacturer uses design tools and test hardware from multiple vendors.
STDF is a well-established data format originally developed in 1993 by Teradyne for parametric failure data, and is still used for storing manufacturing test data for conventional yield analysis. It will provide a flexible starting point for the new standard, but needs further development to provide the efficient structural information required to analyze failures in deep sub-micron technology.
