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| Like
the little brother dwarfed by his larger sibling, TSMC position as one of
the world's largest wafer sort services providers is overshadowed by the
company's foundry leadership reputation. Yet many customers use TSMC's wafer
sort services to achieve significant time-to-volume advantages.
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| TSMC's
wafer sort services are an upstream extension of industry-standard wafer
probe services. Wafer sort services actually cover a very broad range of
specific technical capabilities and business alliances including advanced
probe card manufacturing, third party test partner alliances, and yield
improvement support during technology migration and production ramp. Taken
in total, wafer sort services contribute to a significantly faster yield
ramp and ramp-to-volume. |
| Wafer
sort services begin when the first available wafer sort data becomes available.
At that point, should there be any problems, TSMC engineers begin addressing
root causes of any failures by identifying product design bugs or wafer
fabrication issues. In other words, wafer sort services begin before
production runs start. |
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Testing for Advanced Silicon Technology Wafer sort results from the first production runs are especially crucial for efficient advanced technology ramps for leading edge technologies, for 300mm wafer production, and for bumped wafers. |
| Internally,
TSMC's foundry and R&D management credit the company's in-house wafer sort
capabilities as one of the elements that keep TSMC on the leading edge of
the ITRS process technology roadmap. |
| These
same technology executives also site the company's wafer sorting expertise
as a significant contributor to the relatively fast 300mm manufacturing
ramp up. The seamless transition to 300mm production is, in part, due to
yield enhancement support that is part of the company's in-house wafer sort
capabilities. TSMC provides 300mm wafer on every major testing platform
to read and improve 300mm production yields. In fact, the majority of TSMC's
300mm wafers are probed in-house to immediately generate yield-enhancing
data. |
| The
company's sophisticated wafer sorting services have led to TSMC becoming
one of the first companies to master bumped wafer probing technology. Companion
to its bumped wafer probing service, TSMC manufactures vertical probe cards
to shorten bump probing and yield feedback cycle time. The company has probed
more than 70,000 bumped wafers using probe cards that can read up to 2,000
bumps at a minimum pitch of 150-microns. |
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Third Party Testing Alliances In addition to supporting extensive internal capacity, TSMC works closely with the industry's leading testing companies. TSMC manages test outsourcing using our extensive fab information infrastructure to assess testing capacity planning at least six weeks before demand. As a result, TSMC plans wafer probing to assure on-time delivery. By the end of this year, TSMC will extend its testing quality assurance to wafer probing subcontractors. The program will allow subcontractors to drop-ship tested wafers directly to the next destination, thereby reducing time-to-market cycle time. |
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Wafer Probe Services Wafer probing identifies flaws after wafer fabrication to eliminate the expense of assembling and packaging failed chips. Wafer probe services include engineering test services, test programs, testers and probe cards. |
| Engineering
test services are essential because they provide valuable information for
yield analysis of pilot production runs. Beside providing traditional on-site
engineering testing, TSMC also provides remote engineering testing so that
customer engineers can debug the test program from anywhere in the world,
24 hours a day, seven days a week. TSMC's remote testing capability proved
particularly valuable during the most recent economic downturn and during
last year's SARSs situation when many companies severely limited international
travel. |
| Test
programs are developed according to specific device requirements and are
used to verify that devices perform up to the specification. TSMC's experienced
wafer sort team provides test program development, correlation, conversion
and optimization to verify circuit designs and wafer processes for logic,
mixed signal, embedded Flash, 1T-RAM, SRAM, and SoC devices. The company
is currently developing the latest high speed testing capabilities including
PCI-express and SerDes testing to meet the demands of today's leading-edge
high performance chips. |
| Automatic
Test Equipment (ATE) functionally exercises a design's features under the
instructions of test programs. The tester identifies and rejects any device
that fails to meet specification. TSMC currently runs 150 ATEs including
mainstream testers such as Agilent's HP93000 and HP83000; Teradyne's J750,
J971 and Catalyst. The company can test chips across a nearly endless range
of challenging applications. |
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Probe cards translate small individual die features
into connections to the tester. TSMC's testing service group manufactures
cantilever probe cards for conventional wire bond chips, as well as vertical
Cobra probe cards to facilitate advanced technology wafer sort. |
Time-To-Value Pluses Wafer sort information as part of lot status and yield data is available on the web through TSMC On-line. Information is updated three times a day. Within four hours after wafer out, customers can read their wafer report and Bin summary on-line. |
| TSMC's
in-house testing capabilities compliment its other time-to-volume services.
Yield enhancement support has been so effective during production ramp that,
in some cases, the yield improvement time was cut in half compared to similar
products that were not tested at TSMC. Through process and test Bin Control
systems (SBC and TSBC) based on statistical yield levels, engineers are
instantaneously informed of any abnormality. |
| Yield
enhancement support is particularly important for advanced process wafers.
A majority of TSMC advanced technology customers take advantage of wafer
probing services. During the 0.13-micron process technology production ramp,
more than 90% of wafers are probed in-house. The same process was implemented
for ramping both 300mm and bump probing. Yield analysis allows joint customer
and TSMC engineering teams to almost immediately enhance yields. Upon the
first reading of testing results, the engineering team can quickly correct
design bugs and/or optimize fab processes to improve yield before production
ramps. |
| TSMC
is the only foundry to provide comprehensive production wafer sort services.
These aren't new services; they've been practiced since the company's first
day in business back in 1987. Today, wafer sort has become a strategic,
value-added service that provides the faster ramp-to-yield and the time-to-volume
that has become so critical in the production of wafers at advanced technologies. |
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