“We needed a system to suit EdgeQ’s fast-paced environment, stringent requirements and first-class support"

25.11.2024

Semiconductor company EdgeQ has developed the world’s first “Base Station-on-a-Chip,” a groundbreaking innovation that condenses an entire cell tower into a coin-sized chip. 

This technology promises to make 5G networks more affordable and accessible by shifting from costly infrastructure to software-defined simplicity, bringing connectivity to billions of people and devices across the globe.

EdgeQ’s Product & Test Engineering team plays a critical role in ensuring the quality and reliability of their chips as demand grows. 

Director of Product and Test Engineering, Shanthanu Prabhu said the team recognized that their existing yield management process was no longer sustainable and began seeking a more robust solution to align with the company’s ambitious goals and found their answer in yieldHUB.

In a Q&A interview Mr Prabhu shares details about EdgeQ’s experience:

Can you explain in more detail why you needed a Yield Management System (YMS)?

Mr Prabhu: Modem design and technology is arguably one of the most complex areas in the field of semiconductors. Our approach at EdgeQ is to compact an entire base station into a single chip, the size of a coin. What typically requires 6 or more chipsets is addressed by a highly integrated chip elastically accommodating the entirety of the communications infrastructure market from small cells to macro cells to satellite communications.

As such, the mission critical standards placed on the quality and performance of our chip in an enterprise, telco, or non-terrestrial environment are uncompromising. EdgeQ needed a scalable system for handling voluminous data sets, yield analysis, quality control and excursions to make quick disposition decisions. 

Our existing method of manually crunching data was not sustainable. That is, converting test data to CSV/Excel, data extraction, plotting and then analysis – to scale at the pace and volume of anticipated business in our first years of production. 

Could you tell us why EdgeQ chose yieldHUB?

Mr Prabhu: We needed a system to suit EdgeQ’s fast-paced environment, stringent requirements and first-class support. The platform’s capabilities, features and customer support aligned well with our immediate needs.  

The yieldHUB team was invested in learning and helping EdgeQ succeed – they were instrumental and willing to accommodate our requests and requirements with demos, demo licenses, support and training. 

 Are there specific capabilities within the platform that you find particularly beneficial?

Mr Prabhu: Data Cleansing, automated capabilities such as Statistical Yield Limits (SYL), Statistical Bin Limits (SBL), graphical views (i.e. scatter plots, distributions etc.).

yieldHUB provided us with a straightforward and graphically visual way of summarizing the data that allowed us to focus on the actual analysis, troubleshooting and corrective actions needed in a real-life production environment.

In what ways has yieldHUB positively impacted EdgeQ's operations, especially in terms of efficiency?

Mr Prabhu: Manual data-crunching can be very time-consuming and all-encompassing. We needed to minimize and remove the low-value, low-impact work from our engineers.

With yieldHUB recipes were set up for EdgeQ and we can see test data uploaded from the OSAT automatically. Data extraction is a breeze. Days of effort that were required before we had yieldHUB have now been eliminated. 

What has your user experience been like? 

Mr Prabhu: The platform is simple to use to extract data from any tests, plot graphs and it even suggests statistical limits for our perusal. Extensive training material & literature is available. yieldHUB has a very good ticketing system and we get almost real-time responses within 15 minutes. 

Are you happy you chose yieldHUB as your provider?

Mr Prabhu: EdgeQ has already started planning our next-generation product, which we are extremely excited about in terms of the market possibilities and market disruption that we can bring to the 5G+AI space. 

We look forward to our continued partnership with yieldHUB when we transition our next-generation product from design to mass production. 

Want to see yieldHUB in action? Set up a discovery call with our experts.