About DR YIELD – yield analytics from Graz, Austria

Company

Our story

DR YIELD’s story began years before the company was founded.

In the late 1990s, one of the future founders faced a problem. He was responsible for monitoring a large amount of yield data in an advanced semiconductor fab, and the fear of missing an important signal weighed heavily on him. His solution was to write a set of scripts that checked the data automatically. It was a huge success: almost immediately, the scripts detected trends that would otherwise have gone unnoticed. Within the first few weeks, even in their basic form, the scripts caught an excursion before it became a real issue, saving the company an estimated one million US dollars.

Years later, while managing the introduction of a then state-of-the-art yield management system at another semiconductor fab, he learned that automatic monitoring was still not standard in commercial yield software. He was convinced this had to change.

In 2004, he set out to change it. The idea behind the scripts he had written years earlier became the starting point. He wrote a business plan, brought in other experts in the field, and in 2005 DR YIELD was born.

The team turned that idea into modern software, calling it YieldWatchDog after its purpose — a digital watchdog relentlessly watching over the yield, 24/7. In 2006, we signed our first customer and opened our first office at our current address on the Opernring in Graz.

From there, more and more customers adopted YieldWatchDog, and DR YIELD expanded quickly, first in Japan, then in Europe and North America. By 2013, we had customers and sales partners in all major regions of the semiconductor industry.

As early as 2017, DR YIELD added AI to the YieldWatchDog platform, building on years of integrating and analyzing large volumes of fab data, which is exactly the foundation that AI needs. YieldWatchDog’s anomaly detection now identifies issues early and reduces manual work, which is the same job those first scripts did, just on a very different scale.

Today, after more than two decades, DR YIELD is a leading technology partner for AI-backed yield analytics. In an independent evaluation for one of our clients, a leading global consulting firm estimated that YieldWatchDog could improve workforce efficiency by 20%.

What began with one person’s fear of missing an important signal now helps over a thousand users monitor their production data. And YieldWatchDog is still watching, around the clock, 24/7.

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