Manufacturing yield is stable when the technology is mature. But, once in a while, excursions may occur due to variances in the large number of tools, materials, and people involved in the complex IC fabrication. Quickly identifying and correcting the root causes of yield excursions is extremely important to achieving consistent, predictable yield, and maintaining profitability. This paper pres...

Manufacturing test and failure analysis remain at the forefront of determining why and how chips fail. Defective chips (i.e., those that fail the production test) offer a goldmine of information. If properly mined, they can provide valuable insight into the defects and failure mechanisms that are limiting yield. The industry standard for testing digital integrated circuits (ICs) after manufactu...

This deliverable reports the final work on the TELEMAC supervision system. The supervision system essentially comprises the fault detection and isolation and decision support functions of TELEMAC. Two strands of work are reported, on improving the decision making process through management of hybrid (continuous and discrete) information, and on data mining, particularly applied to data from the...

This Note presents an approximation method for convex yield surfaces in the framework of yield design theory. The proposed algorithm constructs an approximation using a convex hull of ellipsoids such that the approximate criterion can be formulated in terms of second-order conic constraints. The algorithm can treat bounded as well as unbounded yield surfaces. Its efficiency is illustrated on tw...

Analysis of manufacturing data as a tool for failure analysts often meets with roadblocks due to the complex non-linear behaviors of the relationships between failure rates and explanatory variables drawn from process history. The current work describes how the use of a comprehensive engineering database and data mining technology overcomes some of these difficulties and enables new classes of ...

A general method is presented for deriving the limiting behavior of estimators that are defined as the values of parameters optimizing an empirical criterion function. The asymptotic behavior of such estimators is typically deduced from uniform limit theorems for rescaled and reparametrized criterion functions. The new method can handle cases where the standard approach does not yield the compl...

| We address pruning and evaluation of Tapped-Delay Neural Networks for the sunspot benchmark series. It is shown that the generalization ability of the networks can be improved by pruning using the Optimal Brain Damage method of Le Cun, Denker and Solla. A stop criterion for the pruning algorithm is formulated using a modiied version of Akaike's Final Prediction Error estimate. With the propos...

In this work, the initial anisotropy and its evolution with strain, hardening and rupture of DC04 mild steel are characterized by using (i) a phenomenological constitutive model composed by the non-quadratic Yld2004-18p yield criterion combined with an isotropic hardening law and (ii) a macroscopic rupture criterion. For this purpose, an inverse methodology of material parameters identification...