#yield
3 articles
01
·Fabrication & Packaging·★ MEMBER·11 min read
Yield and Design — DFM, the Art of Giving Something Up
A circuit can be correct in simulation and still fail to make money in volume. Defect density models and the clustering factor, design rules that restrict what shapes you may draw, redundancy that assumes breakage, and binning that turns one die into several products — the engineering of trading performance for yield, from first principles.
02
·Scaling & Power·★ MEMBER·10 min read
The Economics of Chiplets — We Split Dies Because We Cannot Build Them Big
Chips are split into chiplets not because splitting is faster but because a single large die cannot be built at a price anyone will pay. The reticle limit, the exponential in yield, cost per good die, the point where splitting starts to lose money, mixing process nodes, and UCIe as a standard for the seam.
03
·Fabrication & Packaging·★ MEMBER·9 min read
How Chips Are Made — From Wafer to Yield
Every GPU and phone processor starts as sand and passes through hundreds of printing steps. From the basic moves — lithography, etching, ion implantation — to the brute force of EUV and the yield math that makes big dies exponentially expensive, explained from zero.