2.

1 Limit Theorems 49

A first step is to formalize the problem. Since we know process ’A’ exactly
we only need to concern ourselves with ’B’. We associate the random variable
Xi with wafer i. A reasonable (and somewhat simplifying) assumption is to
posit that all Xi are independent and identically distributed where all Xi
have the mean µB . Obviously we do not know µB — otherwise there would
be no reason for testing! We denote by X̄m the average of the yields of m
wafers using process ’B’. What we are interested in is the accuracy  for
which the probability
δ = Pr(|X̄m − µB | > ) satisfies δ ≤ 0.05.
Let us now discuss how the various bounds behave. For the sake of the
argument assume that µB − µA = 20, i.e. the new process produces on
average 20 additional usable chips.

Chebyshev In order to apply the Chebyshev inequality we need to bound

the variance of the random variables Xi . The worst possible variance would
occur if Xi ∈ {0; 400} where both events occur with equal probability. In
other words, with equal probability the wafer if fully usable or it is entirely
broken. This amounts to σ 2 = 0.5(200 − 0)2 + 0.5(200 − 400)2 = 40, 000.
Since for Chebyshev bounds we have
δ ≤ σ 2 m−1 −2 (2.18)
we can solve for m = σ 2 /δ2 = 40, 000/(0.05 · 400) = 20, 000. In other words,
we would typically need 20,000 wafers to assess with reasonable confidence
whether process ’B’ is better than process ’A’. This is completely unrealistic.
Slightly better bounds can be obtained if we are able to make better
assumptions on the variance. For instance, if we can be sure that the yield
of process ’B’ is at least 300, then the largest possible variance is 0.25(300 −
0)2 + 0.75(300 − 400)2 = 30, 000, leading to a minimum of 15,000 wafers
which is not much better.

Hoeffding Since the yields are in the interval {0, . . . , 400} we have an ex-
plicit bound on the range of observations. Recall the inequality (2.16) which
bounds the failure probably δ = 0.05 by an exponential term. Solving this
for m yields
m ≥ 0.5|b − a|2 −2 log(2/δ) ≈ 737.8 (2.19)
In other words, we need at lest 738 wafers to determine whether process ’B’
is better. While this is a significant improvement of almost two orders of
magnitude, it still seems wasteful and we would like to do better.