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> I can't really find yield numbers This is not surprising - this is trade secret information as it directly translates to profit margin for the process. AFAIK
by awalton 9y ago
> I can't really find yield numbers
This is not surprising - this is trade secret information as it directly translates to profit margin for the process. AFAIK nobody publishes process yield information other than vague handwavy percentages.
You should also expect percent yields of most processes these days to be pretty poor (numerically): each step brings its percent breakage along, so at 100+ steps for these current processes, you're losing a significant fraction of chips. (Even if all of your steps yield 99%, you're down to 36.6% yield after 100 steps, so it's really important to reduce the number of steps as well as their complexity.)
For a process to be profitable it doesn't need to have a perfect, or even "good" yield though (and so-called "perfect wafers" have been vanishingly rare since about the 14nm process step). I've read documentation about very old processes with yields of 60% that were considered "good" at the time, so 10% might not be a terrible overall yield at this process node (e.g. if we take our 36.6% yield example above, 10% total yield would be of 27% of theoretical - certainly room for improvement, but better than many pharmaceutical processes).
This underlines the importance for the switch to EUV - a dozen or more DUV multi-patterning steps can be dropped down to a single EUV step, which eliminates losses along those multi-patterning steps.
- mud_dauber 9y agoAgreed. About the only number I'd expect from a foundry is a defect density per unit area, which can be used to derive a yield estimate. It's die-size and design-quality dependent, so the quoted D0 is going to be a best case. 10% most certainly is a terrible yield. If TSMC is kicking off volume production, then they have a mostly-SRAM test vehicle somewhere, probably 288Mb or larger, yielding at 65 pct or better on a consistent basis. A 10% wafer would be a financial disaster.