u/king_1607

I've been going down a rabbit hole lately trying to understand how chip test data actually gets analyzed day-to-day at real companies.

From what I can tell, and please correct me if I'm wrong, the workflow looks something like this:

ATE spits out STDF files after every test run. Someone manually pulls those files and loads them into some combination of Excel, internal scripts, or a legacy tool that looks like it was designed in 2003. Engineers spend hours (sometimes days?) just getting the data into a usable state before they can even start asking questions about yield or parametric drift. Reports get generated manually and emailed around.

Is this actually what's happening at most places? Or am I way off?

I ask because I come from a software background and I'm genuinely trying to understand if this is a solved problem or not. Every tool I've looked at (yieldHUB, DR YIELD, Exensio etc.) seems either insanely expensive, built for companies with 500+ engineers, or has a UI that makes me want to cry.

I've been going down a rabbit hole lately trying to understand how chip test data actually gets analyzed day-to-day at real companies.

From what I can tell, and please correct me if I'm wrong, the workflow looks something like this:

ATE spits out STDF files after every test run. Someone manually pulls those files and loads them into some combination of Excel, internal scripts, or a legacy tool that looks like it was designed in 2003. Engineers spend hours (sometimes days?) just getting the data into a usable state before they can even start asking questions about yield or parametric drift. Reports get generated manually and emailed around.

Is this actually what's happening at most places? Or am I way off?

I ask because I come from a software background and I'm genuinely trying to understand if this is a solved problem or not. Every tool I've looked at (yieldHUB, DR YIELD, Exensio etc.) seems either insanely expensive, built for companies with 500+ engineers, or has a UI that makes me want to cry.

I've been going down a rabbit hole lately trying to understand how chip test data actually gets analyzed day-to-day at real companies.

From what I can tell, and please correct me if I'm wrong, the workflow looks something like this:

ATE spits out STDF files after every test run. Someone manually pulls those files and loads them into some combination of Excel, internal scripts, or a legacy tool that looks like it was designed in 2003. Engineers spend hours (sometimes days?) just getting the data into a usable state before they can even start asking questions about yield or parametric drift. Reports get generated manually and emailed around.

Is this actually what's happening at most places? Or am I way off?

I ask because I come from a software background and I'm genuinely trying to understand if this is a solved problem or not. Every tool I've looked at (yieldHUB, DR YIELD, Exensio etc.) seems either insanely expensive, built for companies with 500+ engineers, or has a UI that makes me want to cry.