Test Engineer - Yield Gathering

Yield Gathering

Data gathering plays a very important part during the products' lifespan. In early stages, these data or test yields drive the product to see if it is mature enough to go into mass production. Most companies set specific yield targets for each process that measures what is the yields expected and/or acceptable.

Data is also consistently gathered after the product gets past mass production stage (or general availability aka GA). These data are usually used to improve the quality of the products. For example, data may prove that common chips doesn't work well all the time with the CPU or design of the product. It may also show that a particular field replaceable unit (FRU) fails a number of times in the field. Because of those data, a new component or FRU can be qualified by hardware, software and manufacturing team to drive down the errors or eliminate those problems. These data are provided as input also to the next product with similar design.

In addition, yields will show if another process needs to be introduced (i.e. previous process cannot capture certain test errors due to limitation of fixturing or something else). Yields can also decide if an existing test process can be trimmed down (step-wise or time-wise) or even fully eliminated (i.e. if the ESS errors can be captured during the 3rd hour, test time can be cut down from a normal 24 hours down to maybe 4. Or if a process consistently yields 100% during a 15 month period, teams can get together and decide to eliminate that process at all).