Utilizing Artificial Intelligence For Efficient Semiconductor Manufacturing


The challenges before semiconductor fabs are expansive and evolving. As the size of chips shrinks from nanometers to eventually angstroms, the complexity of the manufacturing process increases in response. It can take hundreds of process steps and more than a month to process a single wafer. It can subsequently take more than another month to go through the assembly, testing, and packaging st... » read more

Tackling Variability With AI-based Process Control


Jon Herlocker, co-founder and CEO of Tignis, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about how AI in advanced process control reduces equipment variability and corrects for process drift. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: How is AI being used in semiconductor manufacturing and what will the impact be? Herlocker: AI is going to create a completely different factor... » read more

AI Process Control Platform Enabling Next Generation Technology, Part 2


As feature dimensions in semiconductors continue to shrink and worldwide demand continues to expand, semiconductor equipment manufacturers need innovative ways to compete and deliver. The Tignis PAICe Maker physics-driven AI computational modeling platform accelerates leading-edge semiconductor manufacturing—from equipment R&D to reliable high-yield chip fabrication capability. Tignis sup... » read more

Challenges In Ramping New Manufacturing Processes


Despite a slowdown for Moore’s Law, there are more new manufacturing processes rolling out faster than ever before. The challenge now is to decrease time to yield, which involves everything from TCAD and design technology co-optimization, to refinement of power, performance, area/cost, and process control and analytics. Srinivas Raghvendra, vice president of engineering at Synopsys, talks abo... » read more

AI Process Control Platform Enabling Next Generation Technology


PAICe Monitor delivers AI and machine learning-enabled analytics for all stages of the semiconductor fabrication process lifecycle — from process development and ramp readiness, to high volume production. Leveraging Tignis’ Digital Twin Query Language, PAICe Monitor enables process engineers to transform in-product fault diagnoses into continuous real-time monitoring—greatly improving ... » read more

Challenges Grow For Creating Smaller Bumps For Flip Chips


New bump structures are being developed to enable higher interconnect densities in flip-chip packaging, but they are complex, expensive, and increasingly difficult to manufacture. For products with high pin counts, flip-chip [1] packages have long been a popular choice because they utilize the whole die area for interconnect. The technology has been in use since the 1970s, starting with IBM�... » read more

Managing Yield With EUV Lithography And Stochastics


Identifying issues that actually affect yield is becoming more critical and more difficult at advanced nodes, but there is progress. Although they are closely related, yield management and process control are not the same. Yield management seeks to maximize the number of functioning devices at the end of the line. Process control focuses on keeping each individual device layer within its des... » read more

Nip The Defect In The Bud


As technology nodes shrink, end users are designing systems where each chip element is being targeted for a specific technology and manufacturing node. While designing chip functionality to address specific technology nodes optimizes a chip’s performance regarding that functionality, this performance comes at a cost: additional chips will need to be designed, developed, processed, and assembl... » read more

Weaving Digital Threads Into A Global Fabric Of Enterprise Knowledge


How smart manufacturing software provides visibility and control of all phases of the semiconductor manufacturing process. Run-to-run (R2R) automated process control gathers critical data from each production run and automatically adjusts process parameters for the next run based on sophisticated models of process performance. Click here to read more. » read more

Next-Gen Transistors


Nanosheets, or more generally, gate-all-around FETs, mark the next big shift in transistor structures at the most advanced nodes. David Fried, vice president of computational products at Lam Research, talks with Semiconductor Engineering about the advantages of using these new transistor types, along with myriad challenges at future nodes, particularly in the area of metrology. » read more

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