I'm glad you clarified that only "line yield" is in the high 90's. I was scratching my head on what happened to the other 6 million CPU's. <g>
Line Yield at >90% for world class fabs is nothing special.
True, but JS implied that line yield was >96%, not 90%.
Petz
Maybe I'm not expressing myself too well. As far as Semiconductor Manufacturing is concerned, line yield is pretty much viewed as a "so what", lower priority indicator, since all it tells you is that your Manufacturing Techs didn't drop the wafers, or your tools didn't mis-handle the wafers, or that you didn't have some process tool malfunction or misprocess (run the wrong tool recipe for example), the wafers so badly that it wasn't economically feasable to continue Procesing that particular wafer, or group of wafers, and they're scrapped.
While it may indicate how well your Manufacturing Technicians and Equipment Maintenance people are doing, it doesn't say anything about the Health of the Process, the Yield of the chips, or the Bin Splits that AMD gets out.
However if the people on this Thread (and Jerry) are concerned with how many wafers the Techs Dropped, or how many equipment malfunctions AMD's Fabs had, then it's a good indicator of that. I use it mostly to point out Training issues and improvements. So what it tells me, is that after several years of operation, AMD's Process Tools are being maintained, and AMD's workers know how to operate their Fab.
Nice information, but as I said....so what.
Semi |
