March 6, 2019 Sprint Meeting PWO discussion

From the official Coventor recording of the Sprint 54 Exit - Wednesday, March 6, 2019.

Here is a discussion about the brand-new Process Window Optimization (PWO) feature developed by the Analytics team, led by Dr. Bill Egan.

High praise from Vice President Dr. David Fried.

Alan Levin: “All right, any questions for Analytics?”

Ken Greiner: “Has SP&I had a chance to look, or Ivan, or anybody else, had a chance to look at PWO yet? Do you guys have any feedback or insight.”

Several people talk at once…

Dr. Joe Ervin: “He is playing with it.”

Dr. David Fried: “OK, so, I had a conversation with Bill about this yesterday. I think this is one of these features, that sort of going back historically, sometimes when we launch our most advanced parts or features or stuff, they are way past what our customers can comprehend. So, like the first entry to market of multi-etch. Our customers are like, “Wow, that’s awesome, I have no idea what to do with it.” And it took, it literally took six to nine months until our customers started digesting what multi-etch was and how to use it and what to do with it. And now, today, it’s like completely standard in everything everybody does, right. This, the PWO piece, worries me, not that it’s not an amazing capability, but that we’re gonna get it out there and everybody is going to go “that’s awesome!” They have no clue what to do. And so, I think trying to get out in front of this one might, I think we might just have to deal with that anyway OK but trying to speed through this hurdle. I think if we have a very compelling example case tutorial that shows here’s my model, here’s the variation data that I’m looking at, here’s spec. Like a story-boarded tutorial and example that goes with that feature, so that when we go out and we work with the customers, we are not showing a feature, we gonna show that story. I think that’s absolutely essential to getting over the hurdle. I think this one is, I think that we are jumping the shark on this one, and it’s going to be so far out in front of our customers that they are going to be paralyzed.”

Analytics PWO allows a semiconductor process integration engineer to do in a 1-2 days (mostly the time the 3D model builds take), with minimal work, a process window optimization that would ordinarily take them weeks to do.

(Note: Coventor always recorded the monthly meetings so everyone would know what was said and people who missed the meeting could catch up.)