Enabling Baseline Yield Improvement with Diagnosis Driven Yield Analysis

Abstract

The time to market of a digital device includes first silicon debug, yield ramp and mature yield improvement. Manufacturing test failures caused by defects during mature yield state are usually hard to characterize for advanced technologies and resemble baseline pattern. Diagnosis driven yield analysis (DDYA) is a solution which can be used efficiently during different stages of product life. Instead of relying on just a handful of high quality diagnosis results, it takes volume layout-aware diagnosis results, performs yield analysis, identifies systematic signature, facilitates root cause analysis, and picks the best candidate die for physical failure analysis (FA). The confirmed PFA result can then be used to adjust fabrication process to improve baseline yield and reduce future occurrences of such failures. Case study in this paper shows this flow helped improve a mature yield by 1.7%.