yieldHUB customer explains the benefits of an external yield management system Vs homegrown

An innovative chip company recently spoke about why they chose an external Yield Management System (YMS) over developing their own product.

The semiconductor company, (for confidentiality purposes, the identity of the client remains undisclosed) said they quickly ruled out the option of developing a homegrown system because of the cost and resources associated with it. 

After assessing several different solutions the company chose yieldHUB. 

yieldHUB VP of Operations, Kevin Robinson, said many semiconductor startups find themselves in similar situations.

“Our customer was aware that a homegrown system requires a huge team to make it all happen. Their product engineer said there were 10 engineers dedicated to this at a former company he worked for. So once they did the salary calculations it was a no-brainer,” Mr Robinson said.

“They also considered the maintenance that goes into a homegrown system. I recall their engineer saying with yieldHUB, ‘you don’t have to maintain a server room or an IT guy to manage it’.”

The chip company had a long list of criteria on their search for the right YMS. They said yieldHUB had ticked all the boxes.

“An example of their criteria included user interfaces and they said it was important that the YMS be ‘clear and straightforward’ with ‘a good support team behind it’. 

“They really liked how yieldHUB had everything in one place and said they ‘valued’ our knowledge and experience. This was really nice feedback because we have a dedicated customer support team who work hard.

“Other criteria they looked into was fast analysis, correlation, automated gage R&R and cloud. Their words were yieldHUB is ‘very powerful because you can log in from anywhere and see the data’ and ‘you just need to upload the log file from the tests you run and after seconds you can get accurate results.”

Mr Robinson said the customer was very strategic and made it a priority to establish solid infrastructure before diving into mass production.

“They were preparing for a huge amount of wafers and this is why they established a yield management system in advance. I remember them saying: ‘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’... 

“In other words, the problem would most likely be related to the silicon, and not the infrastructure. Our customers’ infrastructure has to be solid and reliable so they can focus on the devices.”

The customer explained how they were using the yieldHUB platform in the meantime.

“They said data integrity was key since they were not in production… So what they did was create a test program, inject the data and they ran the test system with yieldHUB.

“At the moment they are also focused on training and make time to do this twice a week. yieldHUB has a library of training videos and very fast response times once a customer lodges a ticket. The customer said they are ‘all yieldHUB experts at this stage’.”

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