Siemens Collaborates with PDF Solutions to Boost IC Yield and Speed Time to Market

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Siemens Digital Industries Software has announced a new collaboration with PDF Solutions, Inc., a global provider of differentiated data and analytics solutions to the semiconductor and electronics industries, to develop a comprehensive solution that transforms integrated circuit (IC) test and yield analysis data from Siemens’ Tessent™ software into actionable intelligence. For mutual customers, this intelligence can dramatically boost manufacturing yields and accelerate time to market for new products.

Siemens’ Tessent™ software for IC test and diagnosis has a long track record of helping many of the world’s most successful IC design firms enhance yield and improve quality by generating root cause defect data based on automated design analysis and end-of-line test data. However, yield challenges extend beyond IC design into manufacturing and other IC lifecycle phases, each of which produce their own categories and classes of yield data.

The new enhancements of Siemens’ and PDF Solutions’ products are planned to work together to deliver a comprehensive solution that aggregates and analyzes design-based, yield relevant data from Siemens’ Tessent software, together with a broad array of other yield data sources, to rapidly analyze and identify yield correlations that are otherwise undetectable quickly, and in some cases automatically.

“Our customers face multi-dimensional yield challenges throughout all phases of the silicon lifecycle,” said Joe Sawicki, executive vice president for the IC-EDA segment of Siemens Digital Industries Software. “Enhancing our design-based, diagnosis-driven yield analysis tools to work with PDF’s Exensio analytics platform promises exciting new opportunities for our customers to uncover yield-limiting correlations across SoC, logic, and embedded memory.”

The foundation of this new collaboration is the combination of Siemens’ Tessent™ YieldInsight™ and Tessent SiliconInsight software with Exensio® Manufacturing Analytics from PDF Solutions. This collaboration brings the power of Tessent yield tools to the product engineer’s desktop, helping to break down silos and overcome barriers to cross domain yield learning. The collaboration also leverages PDF Solutions’ differentiated Fire™ data and layout pattern analysis with Tessent to create a closed loop environment from end-of-line (EOL) test back to fab wafer processing for better monitoring of systematic yield loss, further improving the NPI process.

“To achieve faster yield learning and new product introductions, our customers have been asking for tighter integration between different platforms across the semiconductor product lifecycle, including EDA, manufacturing analytics, and test operations,” said John Kibarian, president, CEO, and co-founder of PDF Solutions. “At PDF Solutions, we believe that collaboration with industry leaders is essential for the continued success of the semiconductor ecosystem, and the benefit of enhancing Siemens’ Tessent products to work with our Exensio analytics platform clearly supports this vision. We look forward to continuing our collaboration with Siemens to help our mutual customers accelerate their yield learning and improve their NPI process.”