SemiWiki.com - Podcast EP301: Celebrating 20 Years on Innovation with yieldHUB’s John O’Donnell

Episode Date: August 1, 2025

Dan is joined by John O’Donnell, Founder and CEO of yieldHUB, a pioneering leader in advanced data analytics for the semiconductor industry. Since establishing the company in 2005 he has transformed it from a two-person startup into a trusted multinational partner that empowers some of the world’s leading semiconductor companies… Read More

Hello, my name is Daniel Nenny, founder of Semiwiki, the Open Forum for Semiconductor professionals. Welcome to the Semiconductor Insiders podcast series. My guest today is John O'Donnell, founder and CEO of Yield Hub, a pioneering leader in advanced data analytics for the semiconductor industry. Since establishing the company in 2005, he has transformed it from a two-person startup into a trust. multinational partner that empowers some of the world's leading semiconductor companies to improve yield, reduce test costs, boost engineering efficiency, and enhance quality. Welcome to the podcast, John.

Thank you, Dan. Pleasure to be here. Yes, nice talking to you again. We've been working with Yield Hub for the last five years, and it's been a pleasure, so I'm glad to have you on. First off, congratulations on Yield Hub's 20th anniversary. That's a big one. How do you feel about reaching such a significant milestone?

Yeah, thank you, Dad. You know, we're delighted to have made it 20 years and hopefully we can continue to celebrate many more milestones into the future. This year has been a game changer for Yiltub in terms of R&D and global expansion. In fact, we're planning to open an office in Germany very soon due to demand. We're also currently implementing a new ground-breaking product called Yultub Live. This is a test diagnostic system for real time with an AI recommendation system and digital twin model.

So AI has been a focus of late with YieldTube and we're growing a team of data scientists in Ireland who have been actually key to progress that within the company. Yeah, it seems like this has been a big year for Yield Hub. Can you tell us about what has led to this big growth period? I guess it's been many years in the making. been developing concepts behind two major drives this year. One is the Yiltub Live, I just mentioned, and the other one is a brand new platform. And both of these developments have required recruiting data scientists, developers and IT experts over the last three years in particular. And it's

coming together this year and next year. First with our exciting real-time product, as I said, which reduces test costs and increases yields much faster than before and our brand new API native platform which we're planning to release next year so we're well up in revenue this year and you know effectively we're in the business of saving our customers millions of dollars and as things get tougher in the world companies are delighted that we can help them and saving money we're very excited about this current growth period yeah yeah it really is an exciting time to be in the semiconductor industry. Before we dive a little bit deeper into the good stuff, for listeners who may not know you, can you fill them in? Can you do the, you know,

the elevator pitch for Yield Hub? Yeah, sure. Yeah. So we are primarily a test-focused data and analytics solution provider for semiconductor companies. That's where I started a test development engineer and product engineer. And this is the focus of the company. Over the last 20 years, we've become a trusted partner to some of the industry's top names across the world. And in particular, we've grown in the last five years. We have a big focus on customer success.

And we provide a really great experience for new customers and our older customers in how we respond and help them solve the real problems. It's all about increasing yield and reducing test costs. So we're very close to customers and we have some great technology and great people. Yeah, you know, I read recently that Yield Hub was featured in Ireland's National Semiconductor Strategy as a success story. Very impressive. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Well, to be honest, it was a real surprise.

Nobody had spoken to us about it that we would feature in this. strategy document and we're delighted that we've been recognised here in Ireland. It's meant a lot to everybody here and you know I think it reflects how advanced the Irish tech ecosystem is and how our companies like ourselves can play a meaningful role and be recognised not just in Ireland but recognised for how we're on the world stage at this stage. So, John, you started your career as a test engineer and went on to build a successful company solving challenges in that very field. What would you say has been the key to your success, both personally and with Yield Hub? Well, personally, I've a very, very supportive family and wife, my wife, Mela.

She's a director of the company as well. She's been rearing our children over the last 20 years, and I've done a lot of travel and all that. So very, very supportive family. And I guess when I started Yield Tub, I had a very clear vision of what I wanted to do and what I believed could be done. And that wasn't been done at the time for yield and test, yield approval test cost reduction. Obviously for success, you have to listen to customers and you have to visit customers and you have to not just offer them what you have, but listen to them for what the real problems are. I had a lot of experience before I set up the company in test engineering, yield improvement and defect reduction. And so I had a clear vision of where I wanted to go, but also it was obvious to me

I didn't know everything. So we recruited people over the years who had worked in different companies in the industry. And I knew also that it wasn't just about building fancy dashboards and fancy charts it was about understanding the real pain points in testing and chips and improving yield you know so so it's it's really about listen to the customer and also going out and visiting them and providing cost effective solutions to them right and to show them real a real return in investment that was very very important um what we found when we went out in the you know when you visit customers and prospects is that a lot of engineers are spending many, many hours digging through data to find why yields dropped or why outliers, you know, where there were

outliers etc. A lot of what they were doing was cleaning the data and before they could ever actually make really good decisions. So we emphasized over, you know, we concentrated a lot of our efforts in providing automated cleaning of data right and then that allowed engineers to work with clean data and use additional tools we provided and to really come to to really good decisions very quickly and so the engineers who in the past might have spent hours and hours and hours analyzing and generation reports now can do the same in minutes and can spend their time on higher value activities. So, you know, this is the constant thing. I mean, it's does with the evolution of semiconductors, there's always new problems and new challenges. And, you know, with the number of

customers we have, we keep up with them and keep seeing where we can help. So yeah, it's been, it's been quite a journey when, when I started my career in in semiconductors, the actual MD of the of the factory or the plant that I was recruited to told me or told us as a group all the graduates at the time that it's a roller coaster of an industry and it's absolutely that. I mean, every year isn't rosy. Every year of the last 20 years hasn't been rosy. It's been some have been difficult, but you know, it's the real, I guess the thread has been upwards on average and significantly in the last few years. But it's been quite a right and looking forward to the next few years, too, obviously. Yeah, I tell my wife the same thing. You know, my career has been a roller coaster. You know, I said it's better than a carousel, right? Yeah, yeah.

So at Yield Hub, you talk about four core pillars. So we've talked about this before. Improving yield, reducing test costs, boosting engineering efficiency, and enhancing quality. Can you walk us through what those mean in purpose? practice and how your platform helps deliver on that. Yeah, sure. The four pillars, as I said, the first one, yield is so, so important. It's at the heart of semiconductor success.

You can have the most amazing design of a chip, but if you're not able to produce enough for them profitably, you're going to fail. So yield is at the heart of what we do. In order for yield improvement to succeed, we help engineers quickly identify trends. root causes of yield loss, and as I said earlier, let them use clean data for that so that they can make really good decisions on how to improve yield very quickly. At the second pillar, being test cost, this goes back to my career in a multinational before I started this company, test cost was what I was really, really concentrating on. And so it's a key pillar as well of yield tub in that there is a lot of low hanging fruit in the whole area of test cost reduction. And we really believe that we can help companies save costs.

And again, in this very competitive environment, to be able to reduce test time, to be able to identify where the losses are in time when your testing chips is. something that's, you know, we, we thrive on those, those, on solving those problems. And the third pillar would be engineering efficiency, how efficient engineers are for discovering problems. And so we have in our platform, a key part of it is to have extremely fast and scalable analysis. We don't want engineers to be spending hours using a system like yield tub to discover something. So we have as much automation as possible in generating reports. We have obviously the cleaning of data at scale. We have making data easily accessible, obviously, in the web, secure platform, obviously.

And another key thing actually is when engineers work together, things become more efficient. So within our platform, we have a very important part is how people can collaborate and comment on each other's work. So it's not just an analysis platform, it's actually a collaborative platform. So it's somebody once called it like Facebook for yield. So engineering efficiency is not just what you can do quickly. It's how you can learn from other people in collaboration. So the fourth item, obviously, is improving quality. And this is so important as well in testing semiconductors and in producing

in semiconductor finished goods, you know, we have tools that are all about ensuring quality for chips. For example, the outdoor detection, there are other tools such as Loth Norm, which basically identifies lots and wafers that are unusual and hence probably need further investigations. And also how to mitigate or eliminate, for example, the scenario of stuck parts in testing chips. So all of these are of really important value to reduce the RMAs or the returns that companies get from the field. So yes, we see it as really, really important. And we're always working in that area to help our customers produce higher quality chips and more reliable chips. So, John, let's back up a bit. You mentioned a new product, Yield Hub Live. Can you talk more about that?

Sir Dan. Yes, we're very excited about this product. Briefly, what it covers is a scalable real-time, multidimensional dashboard of the test and probe operations, the company. So we can in real time detect an alert on parametric deviations, for example, site to site, which is very, very unusual. So we can do this without updating test programs, without adding. hardware. Okay, so there's an AI recommendation system built in which uses, I can use for financial information to make judgments on the most profitable next step in the test flow. It includes a self-adapting system for outlier detection and yeah, it's all built on our secure in a collaborative online analysis system. So this is a pure software solution on scalable servers for large data, a large-scale processing.

So, and it can be applied to hundreds of test cells, all right? So basically for anybody running a factory that's probing our testing tips in high volume, this I believe is a dream system because it's fast, scalable, reasonably priced and has huge return and investment. We have a list of companies who are going to be trialling this, but it's already in production in one facility and successfully as well. Wow, that sounds great. Last question, John.

How do customers normally engage with Yield Hub? Dan, the easiest way to engage with us would be via our website, which is www.yldwob.com. And there's a contact form you can fill out there, and one of our team will be able to get back to you very soon after filling out that form. That's the easiest way. Right, and you're very active in

the ecosystem. I see you at conferences all the time. What conferences do you have coming up? Yeah, sure, Dan. Yeah, we're going to a lot of conferences this year and next year. Coming up, we have ESEC in the Philippines. We have the ITC. We have Semicon West, Semicon, Europa. We're not necessarily having boots at all these conferences, but we will be there. And Semicon, Japan, as well. looking forward to thank for your time john thank you done that concludes our podcast thank you all for listening and have a great day