Yield management practice by user designable YMS

For a semiconductor manufacturer to remain competitive in the marketplace, it must have a highly effective yield-management system (YMS). However, traditional YMSs are frequently not as effective as expected. An extensive investigation of the causes for this failure reveals that: (i) conventional software-development methodologies might not extract correct specifications for a YMS; and (ii) the development time of such a YMS is often too long. This paper proposes a new concept - user-oriented engineering. This tries to make optimum use of the expertise of semiconductor engineers and promote their creativity. YMSs based on user-oriented engineering (UOE-YMSs) have been developed and have been in operation in a number of semiconductor factories for several years. As a result, yield-management tool development cost is dramatically reduced, expert semiconductor engineers have developed their own tools by themselves very quickly, and yields have been greatly enhanced. It is expected that this concept, and the tools developed based on it, can cope with difficulties caused by a future technology node