Mitigating “No trouble found” component returns
Amr Haggag, Nik Sumikawa, Aamer Shaukat, J. K. Jerry Lee, Nick Aghel, Charlie Slayman · 2015
With VLSI scaling, “no trouble found” or NTF parts passing at the component level, but failing at board level manufacturing testing have increased due to the dominance of soft defects over hard defects. An analysis of networking and DSP NTF components shows outlying behavior in not only product parameters but also on-die process parameters revealing new mitigation opportunities. The resulting yield hit is demonstrated to be minor50% component with high debug cost.