Infineon: "We can identify and solve problems by quickly searching its database and analyzing it in a few clicks"

yieldHUB customer Infineon shares details about its experience with yieldHUB's platform.

Infineon is a semiconductor technology company that develops products for Commercial, Automotive, Aerospace, Defense and Industrial applications.

These include high performance memory, micro-controllers, energy efficient and intelligent power modules, sensors, charging devices, lighting, audio, connectivity and hardware-based security products.

The Q&A style interview was carried out with Charbel Abi Samra, Product Engineering Manager, Infineon.

What problem does yieldHUB solve for Infineon?

Infineon: yieldHUB is an all-in-one platform that allows us to retrieve data from a database, review yield and test data, and perform data mining.

Without it, we’d have to use many software tools to get the same result.

With yieldHUB, we can identify and solve problems by quickly searching its database and analyzing it in a few clicks. Having this information and functionality in one central location is a big selling point.

The original company (IRF) was acquired by Infineon a few years ago. Why did you keep yieldHUB as your Yield Management System?

Infineon: The alternative solution used by Infineon isn’t efficient. In that solution, we had to run a query using one program and wait a couple of minutes to download the data. Then we’d load it through another program to analyze it. Then wait for the data to access it and jump back and forth between programs. yieldHUB is much more straightforward, faster and easier to use.

What do you like about yieldHUB’s system?

Infineon: I like the system for its ability to be a one-stop shop for data review, statistical analysis, and reporting.

With yieldHUB, I can compare the performance of a part, across multiple steps and over time. This is very helpful in deciding on the reliability of a manufactured lot.

Most importantly, yieldHUB enables me to create and add custom reports, where we have GroupA, OOF (Out Of Family) and Radeval functions added, all of which increase the reliability of our products. Their solution is always improving and expert support is always available.

What do you like about working with yieldHUB's team?

Infineon: I am impressed by their staff. For example, if needed, they fix critical on-site issues even to the point of “burning the midnight oil” to resolve some issues.

They take suggestions to heart and will query their other customers to see if they like the idea. If feedback is positive, they make it happen.

yieldHUB’s team is dedicated to continuously improving their solution. They are technically well informed. We have a dedicated Customer Success Manager (Carl) assigned to us by yieldHUB, who is our single point of contact with their Engineering and IT staff. Having a single point of contact increases our efficiency in Infineon.

Carl is very helpful by providing feedback to yieldHUB designers in order to close the gaps on user-expectations and overall tool usability.

How does yieldHUB help you do business with your own customers?

Infineon: yieldHUB developed custom reporting tools like OOF that allow us to reduce customer returns and field failures.

Another yieldHUB tool consolidates the test data for our customers into one file. This simplifies the data package we send to the customer and saves us time too. This increases our customers’ satisfaction and helps us build better relationships with them.

How does yieldHUB help you meet compliance regulations for the aerospace and defense sectors?

Infineon: The yieldHUB team has employees in the US. One employee (Carl) is local and has been to the site twice a month to work through issues. This ability to demo face to face significantly helps in working through any issues. In addition, Carl has been masking data sets and creating dummy files before sharing the data back with the development team overseas.

How much more productive does yieldHUB make your team?

Infineon: Reviewing data across a dozen or more files can sometimes take several hours of exporting, formatting and charting data. yieldHUB does these same tasks in a few minutes.

One day we had a request from a customer to tighten a limit. The analysis was done in less than 2 minutes with yieldHUB. It would have taken two hours to locate the data and plot in JMP. yieldHUB increased productivity 60 times in that case.

What is your favorite feature in yieldHUB?

Infineon: Creating box plots and grouping multiple lots together to review the product’s history and the failure Pareto. As Product engineers, we need to ensure our product performance stays under control to prevent failures and schedule delays, so the cpk alert is another feature that greatly helps engineers stay ahead of major breakdowns.

Why should others use yieldHUB?

Infineon: YieldHUB makes it easy to perform the tasks of finding and filtering through a ton of data and quickly perform yield management, data analysis and reporting with other users. Customer service is excellent in my experience. Any complaints can be entered and tickets are assigned, worked on, and expedited in cases of emergencies. The supporting team understands that the yieldHUB system is crucial for production support and they deliver a quick turnaround investigating major problems.

What kinds of people should use yieldHUB?

Infineon: Technicians, Engineers, Data Analysts, Quality, and Managers looking to get a high-level overview of product performance and yields. We’ve had the planning department use yieldHUB to access the custom report for radiation results. We have operators using other custom tools in yieldHUB to evaluate batch performance. Companies looking for increased efficiency, effectiveness and customer satisfaction should use yieldHUB.

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