Reliability/yield trade-off in mitigating “no trouble found” field returns

With VLSI scaling, “no trouble found” or NTF field returns have increased due to the dominance of soft defects over hard defects. An analysis of networking and DSP NTF field returns shows outlying behavior in not only product parameters but also on-die process parameters revealing new mitigation opportunities. The resulting yield hit is demonstrated to be minor <;0.5% to catch NTFs that can be >50% field returns with high debug cost.

[1]  James McNames,et al.  Neighbor selection for variance reduction in I/sub DDQ/ and other parametric data , 2001, Proceedings International Test Conference 2001 (Cat. No.01CH37260).

[2]  N Sumikawa,et al.  Important test selection for screening potential customer returns , 2011, Proceedings of 2011 International Symposium on VLSI Design, Automation and Test.

[3]  Sani R. Nassif,et al.  Goldilocks failures: Not too soft, not too hard , 2012, IRPS 2012.

[4]  Magdy S. Abadir,et al.  Screening customer returns with multivariate test analysis , 2012, 2012 IEEE International Test Conference.

[5]  Magdy S. Abadir,et al.  Multivariate outlier modeling for capturing customer returns — How simple it can be , 2014, 2014 IEEE 20th International On-Line Testing Symposium (IOLTS).