Movandi case study: What makes yieldHUB different
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We started working with innovative fabless start-up Movandi in 2019. This award-winning, venture-backed company from California needed a yield management system to help as they moved into production. Matt Beyer explains what he likes about using yieldHUB.
What does Movandi do?
Movandi is a startup where we build chips and modules to support 5G technology. We focus on mmWave RF and our design architecture is flexible enough to support many topologies and frequency bands in order to solve real-world deployment challenges.
Why did you need a yield management system?
As soon as we began early stages of our production ramps, we recognized that we needed a consolidated yield management software in order to manage everything from fab (WAT), probe, FT, and module test data. The benefits of getting into a good yield management software from day-1 enables simpler and cleaner production ramp.
When you were evaluating tools, why did you choose yieldHUB?
We demoed and compared a few similar software solutions and found yieldHUB met our requirements with a simple, well-designed interface, and an ambitious support team, with a promising product roadmap. We have a lot of institutional experience using similar tools and it was easy to see that yieldHUB would meet most of our needs out-of-box. We worked with yieldHUB's team to implement a few additional "nice to have" features.
What do you like about the yieldHUB system?
Compared with some similar software we've used, we found yieldHUB is a lot more sensibly designed from a software usability perspective. A lot of what would take a multi-stage process with other software solutions is a matter of a couple clicks in yieldHUB. Day-to-day, it means that in a meeting, rather than saying, "Oh, I'll have to generate those plots and get back to you", we are able to just quickly review the data in a much more interactive way and drive much quicker conclusions.
What do you like about working with yieldHUB's team?
Working with yieldHUB's team has been very easy and productive. If there's a meaningful feature request that improves their product, they are almost always open to implementing it or providing a useful workaround. The feedback on these kinds of things is great. yieldHUB’s team provides email updates via their ticketing system, so it's always simple to know the status of any feature request. It's quick and effortless to talk directly to the people who are working on the product, we don't have to navigate through layers of bureaucracy to do what we need to do.
Did it take you long to get used to the system?
The core feature set of yieldHUB is quick to learn. There's a nice set of tutorials and a knowledge database available but a lot of it is obvious and very discoverable once you understand the basic conventions of the software. Internally, we set up a quick document on getting started, which is specific to our most frequent needs, and that is usually enough to get a new user up to speed.
What’s your favorite feature in yieldHUB?
There's a couple of features that are so simple in use that it’s easy to take for granted how useful they are in practice.
Two examples:
1. The multi-test plotting capabilities are incredibly useful in comparing arbitrary test-to-test performance in production data (ex., comparing performance in each channel of a device across an entire lot, or comparing RF characteristics across a frequency band).
2. The "dice analysis" feature is very useful in quickly seeing if a particular device is measuring outside of the normal distribution even if it's a bin1 device. This is useful in quickly detecting test program or spec limit issues that may be leading to non-obvious abnormalities, which is helpful in catching potential issues before pushing a device to production.
Can you describe a specific problem you had and how we solved it?
We're a small company and sometimes find ourselves pursuing unforeseen product opportunities. yieldHUB allows enough flexibility to support a wide range of production activities. For example, we found some unexpected demand for a RF beamformer module that was originally designed as more of a technology showcase for our chip business, and needed to ramp up a production test for it. Since this is an over-the-air 'systems-like' test routine, in order to implement typical ATE software stack would have been prohibitively complex and unnecessary, but using yieldHUB it was easy to integrate this dataset without that overhead. This not only allowed this to be integrated into the rest of our yield database, but also allowed for direct mapping of data from chip-to-module using electrical ID's, which greatly simplified analysis and streamlined the production bring-up immensely.
What kinds of people should use yieldHUB?
One of the core benefits of yieldHUB is that it allows for all the typical production data analysis needs with a well-designed interface and without unnecessary cruft and complexity.
By setting up yieldHUB with each test subcon it allows for a consolidated view of all the production data while still having enough flexibility to support complex and unconventional requirements.
It's a brilliant choice for startups and large businesses alike, and we are confident it can support our needs as we grow our businesses.
Note: As of November 2023, Movandi is no longer a yieldHUB customer.