CLIENT INQUIRY
CANDIDATE INQUIRY
SEARCH HISTORY
RESOURCES
ABOUT US
Advanced Inquiry Systems, Inc.
(formerly Octavian Scientific, Inc.)
Vice President of Worldwide Sales
Advanced Inquiry Systems, Inc. (AISI) brings new revolutionary wafer contact technology to the test area, not merely incremental improvement to conventional technology.
AISI delivers one-touchdown, wafer-level testing. The AISI system is in the fab as part of front-end chip making processes rather than as a discrete back-end process. AISI's solution eliminates a major piece of capital equipment from the test floor, the prober, whose 50%-70% equipment efficiency rating creates hours and days of downtime. The prober's $200-$400K capital cost is eliminated, which is also revolutionary. The heart of AISI's solution is its patented translator which eliminates the probe card as the interstice between the wafer and the automated test equipment. This enables a continuous test flow process and is game-changing. The AISI solution will decrease time to market, reduce the capital equipment footprint and complexity, reduce capex, and reduce a number of operational costs to enable significant improvement in uptime (throughput). These are really valuable contributions for chip makers who are facing increasing R&D budgets for chip design complexity and an eventual migration to 450mm wafers, all against a backdrop of falling average selling prices for their products.
More and more chips are being sold at prices less than the cost of test alone. Chip ASPs peaked in 1995 with a downward trend since. Test investment capital requirements are rising per transistor produced. Conventional probe-card test technology is non-scaling. The ever-improving economics of scale inherent in Moore's Law for chip manufacturing do not translate to test. The value proposition for test is steadily increasing as test costs comprise a growing percentage of total chip costs. Fragmentation of the test industry has inhibited new technical leadership for a total test solution and is exemplified by the fact that all industry development initiatives to date have a 95% correlation to conventional needle-probing technologies.
Test faces a critical pre-competitive chip design and cost crisis. Chip design trends toward diversified chip functionality and circuitry shrinkage are pressing the test floor toward more cost-effective methodology. The initiatives of most value to chip makers for test are a reduction of capital expenditures and an increase in throughput (test logistics). AISI addresses these requirements.
OVP Venture Partners, TL Ventures and NW Technology Ventures led the Series A financing of $6.6 million November 2005 and the Series A-1 round of $~10 Million+ in August 2007. The company has received an additional $2M strategic investment from Intel Capital and has secured a $1.5M line of credit with a prominent venture-oriented bank. AISI has 18 employees, is headquartered in downtown Portland, OR and expects to grow rapidly in 2007-8.
The qualified candidate will have the following:
» For additional information, a more robust position description, or confidential consideration regarding this position, please contact Frank Moscow or Jim O'Leary
» E-mail a colleague about this position