National to use SiidTech's Silicon Fingerprinting to boost chip yields

National to use SiidTech's Silicon Fingerprinting to boost chip yields
By Mark LaPedus, Semiconductor Business News
August 27, 2001 (9:20 a.m. EST)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20010827S0006

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- National Semiconductor Corp. here today announced that it has become the first company to license SiidTech Inc.'s chip-level tracking technology.

Under the terms of the deal, National will license SiidTech's Silicon Fingerprinting technology. Dubbed "ICID," SiidTech's technology electronically tracks CMOS integrated circuits and intellectual property cores in ICs by using measurements of dopant profiles in CMOS transistors to identify each chip.

Introduced last year, the technology help reduce waste in chip manufacturing, boost yields, and prevents fraud in the marketplace, according to Hillsboro, Ore.-based SiidTech (see Feb. 7, 2000, story).

National plans to use the technology to enhance its manufacturing and test yields, said Mohan Yegnashankaran, vice president of product development at the Santa Clara chip company.

"SiidTech worked with us to incorporate ICID into our existing design/manufacturing database and data flow infrastructure," Yegnashankaran said. "National plans to start using ICID on one manufacturing process and gradually increase to several more in the next year or so."

"The package to die-on-wafer correlation afforded by the SiidTech product should help raise our chip yields and greatly enhance our ability for rapid fault isolation," he added.

SiidTech's technology is optimized for National's 0.18-micron process technology," said Steve Sapiro, vice president of marketing at SiidTech. "We also have 0.15-micron in design," he said in an interview with SBN.

The deal with National is a major boost for Siidtech. The Hillsboro-based company is also pursuing alliances with other chip makers and systems manufacturers as well.

The company's technology is an attractive solution, because of its flexibility, low cost, and other reasons. "The technology will run on any CMOS process," Sapiro added.