James O'neill on yield
From Yale Engineering Dean’s Invited Speaker Series featuring Jim O’Neill, CTO, Entegris · · Yale University
“A 1% improvement in yield for an advanced logic fab is worth about $500 million a year in profits. It's worth about $150 million a year for a memory fab.”
On , James O'neill, Senior Vice President & Chief Technology Officer at ENTEGRIS INC, spoke about yield during Yale Engineering Dean’s Invited Speaker Series featuring Jim O’Neill, CTO, Entegris on Yale University.
About James O'neill
James O'Neill, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Entegris, spoke at the Yale Engineering Dean’s Invited Speaker Series in October 2025 about materials challenges in the semiconductor industry. He stated that as technology advances, the size of defects that can kill a chip decreases faster than improvements in defect inspection capabilities, leaving manufacturers "operating in the dark." O'Neill noted that purity specifications for some impurities are now at the part per quadrillion level, which he described as "almost meaningless" because it is not characterizable. He said that a 1% improvement in yield for an advanced logic fab is worth about $500 million a year in profits, and that roughly 95% of the world's advanced semiconductors are made in Taiwan by TSMC. O'Neill also appeared at the PowerShell Conference EU in August 2025, where he gave a presentation titled "A lazy coders guide to exploiting class features." In that talk, he discussed techniques for using PowerShell classes, stating that "PowerShell classes are not really that life-changing" and that when he wrote a section on classes for a book, "the first quite a few pages were basically why you don't need to use PowerShell classes." He also described his time working for Microsoft as "like being married to a beautiful psychopath."