Sleuthworks, Inc.

Sleuthworks has been improving wafer yields since 1992. The company’s founders pioneered the practical use of wafer-level tracking in the 1980s at Hewlett-Packard, and later, through SEMATECH, brought the Wafer Sleuth product to the broader semiconductor industry.

Industry Impact

Today, a majority of SEMATECH member companies and numerous other manufacturers worldwide make Sleuthworks’ full turnkey systems an integral part of their semiconductor fabrication processes. To date, over 700 million wafer IDs have been recorded and analyzed. Over the past two decades, Wafer Sleuth positional/sequence histories have solved many of the most elusive and expensive yield loss mechanisms in 100mm, 125mm, 150mm, 200mm and 300mm fabs.

The Founders

Gary Scher and James Sorensen have almost 50 years of combined experience in the specialized area of wafer-level tracking to reduce semiconductor yield loss. They manage Sleuthworks’ core development team and customer service at U.S. and Asia Pacific fabs. The founders have published a number of papers on yield improvement in semiconductor manufacturing and were instrumental in the formation of SEMI standards on wafer traceability.