by Debra Vogler, Senior Technical Editor, Solid State Technology

April 23, 2008 - Cirrus Logic says it is using Mfg Vision Ltd.'s enterprise yield management system, FloorVision, at its Austin plant, touting "breakthrough results" and "virtually real-time access" to data. WaferNEWS chatted with Mfg Vision CEO John O'Donnell about the significance of what the company calls the product's "Web 2.0" capabilities.

[Ed.: Generally the concept of Web 2.0 can be distilled into a single word: Interactivity. More in-depth definitions can be found at http://radar.oreilly.com, including this one from 2005.]

"Typically, applications that run on the Web are ideal for collaboration and the sharing of reports, but they haven't been able to combine speed along with the interactivity," noted O'Donnell. "But the combination of our database design and Web 2.0 capability enables both fast analysis and interactivity."

Although the news release indicated that the installation at Cirrus Logic was handling over 100GB of compressed data online, O'Donnell told WaferNEWS that the company's product is able to process new manufacturing data into its database at a rate of 6GB/hr, which he said is effectively real-time. "We can get higher rates by adding more hardware as this is scalable. The limiting factor becomes the speed at which the data arrives from the subcontractor or foundry."

Introduced in 2007, FloorVision integrates manufacturing execution systems (MES)-based reporting, genealogy, semiconductor fabrication, wafer probe, and test data across multiple geographies. O'Donnell said that the reporting capability provides for the determination of the highest failing tests for hundreds of wafers (or lots) in a few seconds. "This is accomplished after the data has already been processed into the database," he said, noting that this could involve "a few months of data." He added that only a medium-level server is needed to use the product's features, not a high-end server. -- D.V.