Aug. 22, 2018 –
David Fried, CTO at Coventor, a Lam Research Company, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about how AI and Big Data techniques will be used to improve yield and quality in chip manufacturing. What follows are excerpts of that conversation.
SE: We used to think about manufacturing data in terms of outliers, but as tolerances become tighter at each new node that data may need to be examined even within what is considered the normal range. What's the impact of that on manufacturing?
Fried: When I started in CMOS at 200mm, there was some data on the tools in the fab, but by and large, we were losing it as soon as it was created. When we went to 300mm, we got better at putting sensors on tools, generating data, and in some cases looking at it.