Characterization Vehicle System (also branded as our CV** System)*. Our CV system is a combination of CV test chips, hardware to test such products, software to analyze the test results, and related services. This system is designed to accelerate the efficiency of yield learning by shortening the learning cycle, learning more per cycle, and reducing the number of silicon wafers required in manufacturing processes. This system includes physical IP in the form of test structures and DOEs that are tuned to our customers’ product and/or process specifics, tester hardware, data analysis, and training. The primary software and hardware products included in the CV system are as follows:
| ● | CV Test Chips – Our proprietary test chips are designed by our engineers using our proprietary Fire software. These test chips are run through a customer’s manufacturing process, with intentional process modifications, to provide differentiated data to explore the effects of potential process improvements given natural manufacturing variations. Our custom-designed CV test chips are built for our test hardware and analysis software and include DOEs tuned to each customer’s process. Types of CV test chips include: |
| ■ | Our full-reticle and shared-reticle CV test chips are designed to provide a fast-learning cycle and are fully integrated with third-party failure analysis and inspection tools for a diagnosis to understand root causes. Our full-reticle CV test chips use a shortened process flow to provide a faster learning cycle for specific process modules. |
| ■ | Our Scribe CV test chips are inserted directly on customers’ product wafers to collect data about critical layers. |
| ■ | Our DirectProbe™ CV test chips are designed to enable ultra-fast yield learning for new product designs by allowing our customers to measure components of actual product layout and identify yield issues. |
| ● | pdFasTest® Electrical Tester – Our proprietary electrical test hardware is optimized to quickly test our CV test chips, enabling fast defect and parametric characterization of manufacturing processes. As part of the system offering, we provide test programs for each CV test chip that are tuned to the customer’s process. This automated system provides parallel functional testing, thus minimizing the time required to perform millions of electrical measurements to test our CV test chips. We provide services to analyze the differentiated data output of this tester using the Exensio Characterization software to provide actionable insights to our customers. |
| ● | Exensio Characterization software – This module, which is designed to integrate with the rest of the Exensio software, collects the data generated from our CV test products, generating models of the performance effects of process variations on these design building blocks. As part of the system offering, we also offer analysis services, if the customer elects not to do such analysis itself. |
