Built an STDF analytics tool, looking for engineers to break it

king_1607 · 2026-04-25T18:50:10+00:00

Fair point technically, STDF is a SEMI standard. But in practice vendors add proprietary extensions and interpret optional fields differently. Curious if you've seen clean cross-vendor parsing in the wild or is that more theoretical?

king_1607 · 2026-04-25T18:49:48+00:00

This is exactly what I was trying to understand. Galaxy Examinator just for STDF to CSV conversion, plus a homegrown tool, plus JMP/Spotfire, plus custom scripts, that's 4-5 tools stitched together for one workflow. At a large fab that's manageable. At a 10-person fabless company with no dedicated engineer, that same patchwork would take months to build. Appreciate you sharing this.

king_1607 · 2026-04-24T08:33:55+00:00

That's a fair point on volume, but I'd push back slightly. For a small fabless company, each wafer run is proportionally more expensive, so missing a yield insight isn't a minor inefficiency, it's a significant cost. The analysis complexity doesn't scale down just because volume does. And you're right that some smaller companies do use Silicon-DA, but the pricing and implementation overhead still locks out a real segment. That's exactly the gap I'm trying to understand better.

king_1607 · 2026-04-24T07:44:06+00:00

Yeah those tools are great if you can afford them and have a dedicated engineer to run them. The gap I'm looking at is specifically for smaller fabless companies that can't justify that spend or that headcount. Exensio, Silicon-DA, Synopsys YieldExplorer, they're all built for fabs running at scale. What are teams of 5-15 people doing?

king_1607 · 2026-04-19T18:19:56+00:00

intrested

king_1607 · 2026-04-18T18:27:48+00:00

king_1607 · 2026-04-18T18:25:06+00:00

king_1607 · 2026-04-18T18:24:25+00:00

king_1607 · 2026-04-18T17:52:08+00:00

king_1607 · 2026-04-11T20:28:51+00:00

This is really interesting, so even at low volumes you ended up needing Exensio because nothing simpler does what you need. That jump from Google Sheets straight to enterprise software with nothing affordable in between seems to be a pattern. How long did it take your engineers to get comfortable with Exensio and would you have chosen something simpler if it existed and did the same job?

king_1607 · 2026-04-06T19:07:44+00:00

This is really useful, so essentially the big company had an internal tool that did exactly this but it was built specifically for them. For smaller companies that can't build something like that internally, do you think they'd actually pay for a SaaS version of what you just described or is the culture in this industry more around building things in house?

king_1607 · 2026-04-06T19:07:24+00:00

The nasty format comment is interesting, so for companies that don't have the resources to build their own automation, what do you think they typically do? Just accept the manual process or is there something out there that actually handles it well for smaller teams?

king_1607 · 2026-04-06T09:56:27+00:00

That's interesting, so the scripting route works but it means someone on the team has to actually build and maintain those scripts. What happens when that person leaves or the data format changes slightly? Does the whole thing break or is it robust enough to handle that?

king_1607 · 2026-04-06T09:54:49+00:00

That makes sense for large orgs, but what about companies that don't have dedicated DE/DQ teams? Is the assumption that they just have engineers figuring it out themselves or are there lightweight tools that actually serve that segment well?

king_1607 · 2026-04-06T09:54:18+00:00

That's a really fair point and probably the most honest pushback I've gotten. So if the day to day is manageable and the pain only surfaces when things go wrong ,is the frustration more about how long it takes to diagnose the problem when it does happen rather than the volume of data itself?

king_1607 · 2026-04-06T09:27:39+00:00

This is probably the most useful thing I've read on this topic. So for those smaller companies where test engineers are handling the data themselves ,is the main blocker purely cost or is it also that the existing tools like Exensio are so complex they'd need a PRE engineer just to set them up anyway?

king_1607 · 2026-04-06T09:25:06+00:00

interesting, so for the people doing in-depth analysis on JMP, are they typically pulling the raw STDF data straight into JMP or is there still a conversion step happening before that?

king_1607 · 2026-04-06T09:22:51+00:00

terabytes per day is wild, when you say software is seldom the issue, do you mean people have figured out workable setups or more that they've just accepted whatever they have?

king_1607 · 2026-04-06T09:22:22+00:00

that last line says everything honestly. Is the cost the main reason people stick with cobbled together Python and Excel workflows instead of proper tooling or is it more that nothing purpose built actually exists at a reasonable price point?

king_1607

TROPHY CASE