Inovys purchase to make V93000 yield-learning tool

Efforts to position the V93000 as a yield-learning tool drove Verigy’s decision to purchase Inovys, according to Larry DiBattista, the senior manager at Verigy responsible for the Inovys initiative. The ultimate goal, he explained, is to tightly link the V93000 tester with EDA software to prioritize root causes of defects and identify the defects with the largest yield impact.

Over the past year, DiBattista said, “There has been a lot of customer pull with regard to yield learning in general.” As a result of that customer pull, he added, Verigy and Inovys found themselves cooperating in some customer-specific situations on yield improvement. The cooperative effort, he said, “helped us establish that we could put an ATE instrument into the workflow” to identify yield-improvement opportunities based on test results.

The yield-improvement concept, he said, involves allowing a tester to enhance the data that it receives. When a 93000 tester spots a failure that looks like statistically probable yield-limiting defect, he said, the tester collects additional data to build a data set that Inovys software can then process to perform schematic analysis and ultimately to generate a physical defect map.

As the companies worked together, though, they encountered one obstacle: As the tester and software combination zeros in on a physical defect area, DiBattista said, it might be the case that the Inovys software could be more effective if certain changes—to structural or functional vectors, for example—could be made within the V93000 test program. “We really needed to establish a much tighter loop with the Inovys software,” he said, adding, “We could close the loop if we had full access [to the Inovys software] and allowed [Inovys] full access” to the V93000 software. “The Verigy purchase of Inovys made sense as the optimum way to provide the much tighter level of integration we needed to expand the capability to meet the specifications of our strategic customers.”

As for the Inovys Ocelot testers, DiBattista said, “Ocelots address a market that we really don’t serve with the 93000: FA, debug, and validation. And the customer base for the Ocelot is very important to Verigy as well.”

He added that all Inovys employees have been offered jobs within Verigy.