YieldManager Solar

YieldManager® Solar is a comprehensive data analysis solution for solar cell manufacturers that reduces costs and increases solar cell efficiencies.YieldManager Solar enables solar fab test and production engineers to quickly identify and correct root causes of solar-efficiency and yield degradation caused by subtle fab processing fluctuations or instability – saving time, maximizing equipment utilization, increasing yield and reducing costs.

• Minimizes cell loss by providing early warnings about process parameter shift and other problems in specific process equipment.
• Enables cell lots to be traced back to materials from different wafer lots or suppliers and correlated with the measurement results of the cell tester and sorter.
• Commonality analysis capability traces problems back to specific equipment.
• Powerful, easy-to-use interface enables generation of various dash boards and reports.
• Fast, comprehensive drill down analysis allows access to key manufacturing and quality data.
• Provides sophisticated SPC analysis with user-defined rules.
• Generates a variety of chart types and reports to guide trouble shooting and provides production staff with seamless control of the manufacturing environment.
• Distributed Microsoft .NET architecture allows system to be installed as a single server system or distributed across multiple servers.
• Configurable business logic allows seamless integration to other applications and user customization.

As with semiconductors, solar cells are produced using a variety of manufacturing tools and equipment, each of which presents data in a unique format. With such a complex process and varying data, identifying the root cause of problems requires a holistic approach to analysis. Other systems create individual reports for particular tools and the current lot, making root cause analysis of yield degradation difficult, manual, inaccurate and time consuming.

YieldManager Solar is an open and scalable analysis tool that collects and organizes current and historic manufacturing data from all the process equipment. It provides solar manufacturers with a closed-loop quality assurance flow, control of the fab and dynamic tracking of assembly and test in a single manufacturing execution system (MES). YieldManager Solar assimilates visible and non-visible defects, parametric data, electrical test information, process and equipment data and recognizes process trends and excursions that facilitate the rapid identification of yield detracting mechanisms. A powerful interface allows fab engineers to easily filter data by lot, ingot, substrate, wafer and more, and to generate customized, interactive reports for statistical process control (SPC) analysis. With this comprehensive analysis system, yield problems can be identified quickly and easily.

YieldManager Solar exports raw data and generates customized drill-down charts for accurate analysis.

Comprehensive Analysis and Traceability 

• YieldManager Solar maintains and provides real-time accessibility to the complete history of all manufactured lots, substrates and cells from multiple production sites.
• Automatic detection and control of parametric data collection combined with a structured data and failure analysis tool make it possible to solve problems and ramp up yield quickly.

In-depth Work Flow Management 

• Executive dashboard visualization of key manufacturing and quality performance indicators, root cause analysis of issues and controlled execution of all stages of manufacturing process facilitates continuous product and process improvements.

Enhance Shop Floor Work in Process Management 

• Multi-level work in process (WIP) tracking provides visibility and control of the changes occurring with the equipment or manufacturing cells and their impact on the overall system and yield. Movements can be controlled by time limits, holds and results achieved.

Technology Features:

YieldManager Solar Features 
• Industry Standard File Format Support – Including MODBUS over Rs232/.csv files.
• Support Module – WIP, inline, wafer acceptance test (WAT), process control monitoring (PCM), cell sort and final test.
• Cell Mapping – Bin, parametric, composite, gallery, zonal (circular, radial, quadrants, stepper shot, by column/row), pattern recognition.
• Correlation – Creates correlation coefficient matrix between inline process data,WAT,cell sort and final test.
• Limit File Management – Allows setup limit file for parameters such as spec, valid, control and engineering.
• Process Control – Generates trend chart, histogram, Pareto, box plot, and scatter plot.
• Statistical Summaries – Generates statistical summaries such as mean, standard deviation, min, max, median, Cp/Cpk/Ca, etc.
• Data Explorer – Provides web-based spreadsheet module to analyze any data.
• Raw Data Report – Exports any raw data to spreadsheet-compatible formats.
• Open Architecture – Supports SOAP/ XML/ASP/Visual Basic/Microsoft .NET for web services.

System Requirements 
• Hardware – Standard Desktop Edition 1 GB RAM
• Software – Windows XP/Windows 2003/Windows Vista IIS 6.0 or higher