Genesis Microchip yields visible gains with real-time information access

Making a profit in the semiconductor business necessitates staying on top of yield—i.e., the proportion of sellable product in every production batch. In semiconductor manufacturing, yield can run from 70 percent to 90 percent, but poor yield at one step can snowball through further stages of the manufacturing process. Remaining profitable requires catching and fixing problems early.

Monitoring yield requires running hundreds of tests on every lot of chips at every stage of production, which generates gigabytes of data every day. Semiconductor manufacturers are turning to enterprise yield-management solutions to pinpoint problems and get real-time answers.

Case-in-point is San Jose, Calif.-based Genesis Microchip, a supplier of “system on a chip” image processors for flat-panel TVs and computer display products. Genesis recently adopted an on-demand solution from Syntricity to address yield-management issues.

Genesis boasts 12 display-system products in three product lines, manufactured by five suppliers. Genesis product and yield data therefore comes from five sources, in five formats.

Genesis suppliers run tests on products at various stages of manufacturing—e.g., input current and output current, wafer acceptance, die pass/fail, performance, built-in self tests, and functional tests.

“The more tests you do, the lower your yield,” explains Pradeep Sahu, Genesis' senior director of product/test engineering. “There's some failure at every test, regardless of the quality of the manufacturing process.”

With five suppliers—including foundries, assembly houses, and test firms—testing 12 products at multiple stages in the manufacturing process, the result is a mountain of data: at least one gigabyte every day. Genesis needed to be able to sort through the data, find where yield fell below acceptable levels, and pinpoint the root cause.

Until 2002, Genesis had no way of seeing yield data in real time. Test and yield reports came from suppliers as Word or Excel files, and Sahu got a weekly report. By the time Genesis could identify problems, faulty microprocessors might already have been assembled into products, leading to waste and loss.

Syntricity's dataConductorEP enterprise yield-management system compiles yield and test data from Genesis suppliers into a single warehouse, analyzes the data, determines yield at each step, and alerts Sahu and other Genesis personnel when yield is out of tolerance range. Yield results are presented in various graphical formats suited to the person requesting access—i.e., technicians, engineers, managers, or executives.

“Statistical analysis of the test results could show a high correlation to a certain electronic parameter in a certain manufacturing step,” explains Marc Friedman, president and CEO of Syntricity.

Now Syntricity's Advanced Monitoring for Production software—only recently adopted at Genesis—allows technicians, engineers, and managers to drill down and view results of every test on every batch, with results displayed in graphs, if necessary. “We don't have to look at every test anymore,” says Sahu. Instead, Genesis relies on the software to pick out the worst 10 tests on every batch or bin, and flag any major problems.

Most important, by identifying which batches fail which tests, the software pinpoints the root causes of problems as soon as they happen.

“Each morning, I can click on the Syntricity screen and see a snapshot of the yield from each stage of production,” Sahu says, adding that because it's delivered through a browser as a service, the information is available anywhere Sahu or other Genesis people happen to be. “The data is not only distributed geographically, but can be shared with partners and customers through Web portals,” explains Syntricity's Friedman.

Real-time display of what's working and what's not working allows technicians and engineers to intervene and solve problems before the batch progresses to the next stage of production. Most important, it's allowing Genesis to ensure product quality while speeding time-to-market.