yieldHUB customer: “The value of yieldHUB outweighs the cost”

Customer story

A forward-thinking chip company in the middle east says they are focusing on establishing solid infrastructure as they prepare for mass production.

The innovative semiconductor company (which can’t be named because they are in stealth mode) already has a test platform and yield management system (YMS) in place.

Their leading product engineer explained why it was important for them to set up their yield management system prior to ramp-up.

“We are preparing for a huge amount of wafers, this is why I’m establishing a yield management system in advance,” the yieldHUB customer said.

“I want to be 100 percent ready for the wafers so if we encounter a problem it will not be because of yieldHUB or the test platform, it will be because of the silicon. 

“Therefore, we can focus on the silicon problem and not on the infrastructure problems.”

He continued: “Infrastructure has to be solid and reliable so we can get to this point and focus on the devices and not worry about potential discrepancies between the log file and yieldHUB, for example.

“I want to focus on my device so that’s why we are making preparations for mass production now.

“Data integrity is key. Since we are not in production and want to validate data integrity, we create a test program and inject the data and run the test system with yieldHUB.”

He said he’s already seen the value in yieldHUB, despite not being in production.

“I think the value of yieldHUB outweighs the cost. If we didn’t have yieldHUB we’d have to develop something in-house and need to maintain the system all the time.

“yieldHUB is doing this for us, it's always maintaining and improving the system. When I was working at another company we developed a homegrown system that required a team of 10 engineers.

“They were dedicated to the parsers, and data collections and were responsible for maintaining the database and reports. 

“When I started at [the company which can’t be named] I had two choices - to look for an off-the-shelf product or to establish an internal group to develop everything in-house. 

“I just needed to do the salary calculations to realize it was better to use an off-the-shelf yield management system.”

Further, he stated: “Everything is in one place” and the team behind yieldHUB “has a lot of knowledge and experience that’s valuable to us.”

The product engineer said they evaluated several options before making a decision.

“The first criteria we looked at was the cost and then we evaluated several key technical components. It was also about the user interface. 

“It was important to me that things were clear and straightforward and that there would be a good support team behind it. 

“There were two main reasons I chose yieldHUB. The first was the user interface and the second was the people.”

He said it felt like yieldHUB wanted them to succeed.

“With Kevin [Director of Customer Success at the time, now VP of Operations] and John [CEO], I really felt that they were there to support me. As a customer that gives me a great feeling and made the decision easy. 

“I don’t have one bad thing to say about yieldHUB, they are professional and very fast.”

He gave an example of how yieldHUB saves him time.

“We know what kind of analysis we may need in the future and simulate this and with some use cases for engineering and production, we’ll be ready with fast analysis. 

“One of the procedures to release new hardware is correlation. Other companies might use a tool like Excel for correlation and the analysis is not straightforward. 

“It takes time, and there’s a lot of manual work but with yieldHUB, the gage R&R is automated so you just need to upload the log file from the tests you run and after seconds you can get accurate results and can make a decision.”

Another benefit that he mentioned, was the library of training videos that yieldHUB makes available to its customers.

“One of our targets for the moment to prepare [for mass production] is training. yieldHUB has amazing training with videos and explanations and very fast responses from the support team. We are all yieldHUB experts at this stage.”

In addition to features and capabilities like characterization, correlation, and Gage R&R, yieldHUB operates on a cloud-based system. 

“Because of cloud, yieldHUB is very powerful in that you can log in from anywhere and see the data. 

“I have two engineers here in [the Middle East], one engineer in [Asia], and two other users who we train on a weekly basis. You don’t have to maintain a server room or an IT guy to manage it.

“Also, with AWS there are a lot of benefits in terms of privacy and security.”

He said he’s a happy customer.

“Since I started working at [current company] I’ve made good and bad decisions and one of the best decisions was to choose yieldHUB.”

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