Mitigating “No trouble found” component returns

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 minor <;0.5% to catch NTFs that can be >50% component with high debug cost.