November 7, 2005 — Knights Technology, a subsidiary of FEI Co., has announced collaborative efforts with Cadence Design Systems Inc., San Jose, CA, as well as the validated interoperability of Knights’ Camelot and YieldManager software with the Cadence Encounter Diagnostics solution. The joint program is expected to better utilize yield diagnostic and fab data to identify and resolve yield excursions, since customers of both companies face shrinking process geometries and intense demands to ramp product yields quickly.
An unidentified semiconductor manufacturer is serving as the initial catalyst for the joint effort and is helping the companies define specific areas where yield diagnostic data from Encounter Diagnostics can be quickly passed to Camelot to more easily perform physical failure analysis (PFA). Results from yield diagnostics will be further analyzed by YieldManager to help improve yields in the fab.