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Nvidia licenses Yield Explorer of Synopsy

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CIOL Bureau
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PARIS, FRANCE: Nvidia Corporation, the graphics chip vendor, has licensed Yield Explorer, of Synopsys, in order to cut time-to-volume.

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Yield Explorer, which is a yield management tool, is claimed to speed up discovery and mitigation of yield limiters in leading-edge ICs.

In May 2009, NVIDIA had adopted the IC Validator, of Synopsys, to validate multi-billion transistor graphics processors. NVIDIA had claimed that it had, thanks to using the IC Validator, achieved near-linear scalability – for example, the 20x accelerated time to tapeout speedup using 25 CPUs.

According to Synopsys, the Yield Explorer – described as a complement to the TetraMAX diagnostics solution of Synopsys – links all aspects of the design, manufacturing and test flows into a single data-bank. It also minimizes design re-spin through comprehensive and rapid capture of design-process-test interactions.

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In a press release, NVIDIA Corporation said that, having been confronted with challenging production ramp at each nanometer node, the company required to consolidate all its volume ramp activities in a single tool.

NVIDIA added that, with the Yield Explorer, it is able to combine coherently and cross-correlate large volumes of data from the design, test domains and fab to identify quickly the major failure mechanisms. Another licensee of Synopsys Corporation’s Yield Explorer is STMicroelectronics.

A statement from Synopsys explained that the company has 5 ongoing evaluations for its Yield Explorer with “select target customers” who stand to benefit from the “design-centric yield analysis capabilities” of Yield Explorer.

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