May 30, 2012 -- Synopsys, Inc. today announced that GlobalFoundries has selected Synopsys' Yield Explorer solution as part of its next-phase Yield Management System (YMS) for faster yield ramp based on volume diagnostics. Rapid identification and correction of systematic failure mechanisms is critical to bringing a new technology node to production and driving the yield ramp on new IC designs.

Yield Explorer Automated Volume Diagnostics allows GlobalFoundries to quickly identify the dominant systematic failure mechanisms on early test chips as well as customers' chips, thereby reducing the time to achieve desirable yield levels. In addition, Yield Explorer's ability to combine and analyze data from design, fab and test domains enables collaboration between GlobalFoundries and its customers to rapidly identify failure mechanisms and activate process or design corrective actions with high clarity and ease.

Yield Explorer delivers flexibility and depth of capabilities in correlating yield loss to various design, fab and test attributes, as well as fast, robust automation for production analysis and reporting. Expert users benefit from the flexibility to perform analysis with an exploratory approach. Production teams rely on automated analysis routines to create various reports and provide a quick first view of yield issues on new production batches with minimal impact on cycle time. In addition, any inputs to design teams for adjusting test plans or incremental layout changes are provided with specific and actionable details about the yield-limiting attribute of test or layout. The automated volume diagnostics in Yield Explorer are simple to deploy and work smoothly across a variety of design, fab and test outputs and data formats.