Company Overview
PDF Solutions is a semiconductor analytics platform provider serving the entire chip development and manufacturing ecosystem. Their tools help companies improve yield, shorten learning cycles, and increase visibility across global supply chains.
Their analytics and inspection solutions are critical to the technologies people use every day, including consumer electronics, automotive, cloud infrastructure, and AI hardware.
Today, PDF Solutions is leading the industry’s shift from localized, siloed process control toward system-level integration. Their platform is built to support 3D architectures, chiplets, and globally distributed fabrication.
The Hardware Challenge in 3D Chip Inspection
As integrated circuits evolve into 3D structures, traditional inspection methods like surface-level optical scanning can no longer detect many of the defects that affect performance and yield.PDF’s eProbe platform, and especially the latest generation eProbe 450, was developed to overcome this limitation.
“We realized 90 to 95 percent of the time spent scanning a wafer with an eBeam is wasted. You’re just seeing stuff you don’t care about.”
Dr. John Kibarian, CEO, PDF Solutions
PDF Solutions User Conference, October 24, 2023
The eProbe 450 uses a design-aware, vectorized scanning method to target only critical electrical features. It eliminates the need to raster across every surface and enables sub-nanometer precision while scanning over 10 billion features per hour.To support this, PDF needed a hardware platform capable of precise beam coordination, high-throughput data acquisition, and tight timing control, all without the delays and expense of building custom FPGA boards.
The Solution: Opal Kelly XEM7350-K160T
PDF Solutions selected the XEM7350-K160T, a production-ready FPGA integration module built around the Xilinx Kintex-7 XC7K160T-1FFG. This module serves as the core logic and acquisition engine inside the eProbe 450.
“We needed something with enough horsepower to synchronize data collection with beam movement in real time. We didn’t want to overengineer it or build a custom board.”
Kirk Hargreaves, PDF Solutions
The XEM7350-K160T offered a high-performance feature set tailored for real-time signal coordination and throughput:
Feature XEM7350-K160T FPGA XC7K160T-1FFG Slice Count 25,350 D Flip-Flops 202,800 Distributed RAM 2,188 KiB Block RAM 11,700 KiB DSP Slices 600 Available I/O + GTP 168 + 8
These specs translated into a robust, off-the-shelf platform that allowed PDF to:
- Cut development time by 3–4 months
- Avoid the risk and complexity of high-speed memory and custom interface design
- Standardize on a modular solution built for future scalability
“Using the XEM7350 shaved 3–4 months off our development time… Avoiding DDR3 design alone made it worth it… And when we evaluated the cost, the full Opal Kelly board—with RAM and interfaces—was actually cheaper than just buying the FPGA chip itself.”
Kirk Hargreaves, PDF Solutions
Explore the module here: XEM7350-K160T
Learn more at opalkelly.com
Impact: Precision, Performance, and Platform Integration
With the XEM7350-K160T at its core, the eProbe 450 delivers:
- Sub-nanometer beam targeting
- Over 10 billion features scanned per hour
- Design-aware targeting that skips irrelevant areas
These capabilities help PDF’s customers:
- Diagnose systematic yield issues more quickly
- Shorten yield learning cycles during R&D
- Support early-stage development for the most advanced semiconductor nodes
Because the eProbe 450 is tightly integrated with PDF’s Exensio® platform, all the data it generates flows directly into analytics pipelines that span testing, process control, and production monitoring. This allows for real-time, system-level decision-making across global operations.
Conclusion
As the semiconductor industry moves toward more integrated systems and global manufacturing coordination, PDF Solutions is leading the way. Tools like the eProbe 450 are central to that transformation.
At the core of the eProbe 450 is the Opal Kelly XEM7350-K160T, delivering the performance, precision, and development speed required to push the boundaries of modern semiconductor inspection and analytics.
