Product Briefing Outline: Mentor Graphics has released the "YieldAssist" diagnostic tool. 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.

Problem: 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.

Solution: YieldAssist allows semiconductor manufacturers to use collected information and identify both systematic and random defects to drive failure analysis and yield improvement. It also provides a 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, according to the company. Using the failure data from manufacturing test, YieldAssist is able to isolate the cause of a 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 is claimed for production environments 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, according to the company.

Applications 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.

Availability: YieldAssist is available immediately. Pricing starts at $126K per year for a term based license.