CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
31 October 2005
Product News
Mentor Graphics Expands DFM Strategy with YieldAssist Diagnostics Tool for Yield Improvement
Mentor Graphics Corporation announced the immediate availability of the YieldAssistT diagnostic tool. With the ability to identify and isolate yield-limiting defects, YieldAssist enhances semiconductor yield and expands Mentor'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.
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 nanometer technologies continue to shrink.
Improving yield in the nanometer era requires solutions that span all aspects of the design to manufacturing flow. Failing devices from the wafer sort phase of manufacturing test can provide a goldmine of information for yield and failure analysis engineers. 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 nanometer designs is the first step in yield improvement. The high quality manufacturing tests created with the TestKompress® or FastScanT 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."
Pricing and Availability:
YieldAssist is available immediately. Pricing starts at $126K per year for a term based license. More information is available at http://www.mentor.com or by calling 800-547-3000.
Become a member of the CIMdata PLM Community to receive your daily PLM news and much more.
Tell us what you think of the CIMdata Newsletter. Send your feedback.
CIMdata is committed to your privacy. Your personal information will never be sold or shared outside of CIMdata without your express permission.