Posted on EE Times Click here to view original article
By: Nitin Dahad
There was a time in semiconductor manufacturing when equipment vendors simply delivered a tool to the fab and their responsibility ended there. However, with the rapidly growing complexity in chips and in the manufacturing process steps, everyone has to be involved in what is effectively a team sport, from the foundries and equipment vendors to fabless design companies, who must all collaborate in real time on the manufacturing floor to ensure yield is both optimized and maximized.
That is the message from John Kibarian, president, CEO and co-founder of PDF Solutions, who spoke to EE Times earlier this month at the company’s user conference held at the beginning of December in Santa Clara, Calif. He also highlighted that with the industry’s goal to reach $1 trillion by 2030, AI-driven collaboration with smarter decisions could unlock an additional $140 billion in value from tools currently operating probably at only 60-80% efficiency.
Watch the full video interview below:
In the opening keynote at the PDF Solutions user conference, Michael Campbell, chief supply chain officer and senior VP of engineering at Qualcomm, said that the semiconductor industry is at a crossroads and it needs to move beyond the concept of design and technology co-optimization (DTCO), which has very much a silicon-only focus, and start thinking more about system and technology co-optimization (STCO), which brings in many more disciplines.