Leveraging Data In Chipmaking

John Kibarian, president and CEO of PDF Solutions, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about the impact of data analytics on everything from yield and reliability to the inner structure of organizations, how the cloud and edge will work together, and where the big threats are in the future. SE: When did you recognize that data would be so critical to hardware design and manufacturing? Kibarian: It goes back to 2014, when we realized that consolidation in foundries was part of a bigger shift toward fabless companies. Every fabless company was going to become a systems company, and many systems companies were rapidly becoming fabless. We had been using our analytics to help customers with advanced nodes, and one of them told me that they were never going to build another factory again. Our analytics had been used for materials review board and better control of our supply chain and packaging before that.