The yield estimation of semiconductor products based on truncated samples

School of Microelectronics, Xidian University, Xi’an 710071, P.R. China

^⋆ Correspondence: kkgukai@vip.qq.com

Received: 24 June 2013
Accepted: 6 October 2013

Abstract

Product yield reflects the potential product quality and reliability, which means that high yield corresponds to good quality and high reliability. Yet consumers usually couldn’t know the actual yield of the products they purchase. Generally, the products that consumers get from suppliers are all eligible. Since the quality characteristic of the eligible products is covered by the specifications, then the observations of quality characteristic follow truncated normal distribution. In the light of maximum likelihood estimation, this paper proposes an algorithm for calculating the parameters of full Gaussian distribution before truncation based on truncated data and estimating product yield. The confidence interval of the yield result is derived, and the effect of sample size on the precision of the calculation result is also analyzed. Finally, the effectiveness of this algorithm is verified by an actual instance.