Anne Meixner

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Anne Meixner is a contributing editor at Semiconductor Engineering. She has 30+ years in the semiconductor industry. She became fascinated by defects in the semiconductor manufacturing process as a young engineer at IBM. Over that period, she has focused on test methodology with emphasis on mixed-signal and analog DFT and test. As a technical communicator she takes complex ideas and explains them in consumable understandable pieces. Meixner has worked at IBM, Carnegie Mellon University and Intel. She holds three U.S. patents and her peers have recognized her work with two best papers at IEEE International Test Conference. She founded The Engineers’ Daughter in 2015 to consult on semiconductor testing and to coach engineers.

Author's Latest Posts

Smart Manufacturing Makes Gains In Chip Industry
By Anne Meixner - 15 Jun, 2023 - Comments: 0

Lights out manufacturing is gaining steam across the semiconductor industry, accelerating productivity, improving quality, and reducing costs and environment impact. These benefits are the result of years of strategic investments in technologies like machine-to-machine communication, data analytics, and robotics to achieve higher levels of autonomy. Semiconductor factories have long depen... » read more

Ramping Up Power Electronics For EVs
By Anne Meixner - 06 Jun, 2023 - Comments: 0

The rapid acceleration of the power devices used in electric vehicles (EVs) is challenging chipmakers to adequately screen the ICs that power these vehicles.[1] While progress toward autonomous driving is grabbing the public’s attention, the electrification of transportation systems is progressing quietly. For the automotive industry, this shift involves a mix of electronic components. Amo... » read more

Challenges Grow For Creating Smaller Bumps For Flip Chips
By Anne Meixner - 18 May, 2023 - Comments: 0

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

Pinpointing Timing Delays Can Improve Chip Reliability
By Anne Meixner - 09 May, 2023 - Comments: 0

Growing pressure to improve IC reliability in safety- and mission-critical applications is fueling demand for custom automated test pattern generation (ATPG) to detect small timing delays, and for chip telemetry circuits that can assess timing margin over a chip's lifetime. Knowing the timing margin in signal paths has become an essential component in that reliability. Timing relationships a... » read more

Smarter Ways To Manufacture Chips
By Anne Meixner - 20 Apr, 2023 - Comments: 0

OSAT and wafer fabs are beginning to invest in Industry 4.0 solutions in order to improve efficiency and reduce operating costs, but it's a complicated process that involves setting up frameworks to evaluate different options and goals. Semiconductor manufacturing facilities have relied on dedicated automation teams for decades. These teams track and schedule chip production, respond to equi... » read more

What Data Center Chipmakers Can Learn From Automotive
By Anne Meixner - 11 Apr, 2023 - Comments: 2

Automotive OEMs are demanding their semiconductor suppliers achieve a nearly unmeasurable target of 10 defective parts per billion (DPPB). Whether this is realistic remains to be seen, but systems companies are looking to emulate that level of quality for their data center SoCs. Building to that quality level is more expensive up front, although ultimately it can save costs versus having to ... » read more

Getting Smarter About Tool Maintenance
By Anne Meixner - 16 Mar, 2023 - Comments: 0

Chipmakers have begun to shift to predictive maintenance for process tools, but the hefty investment in analytics and engineering efforts means it will take some time for smart maintenance to become a widespread practice. Semiconductor manufacturers need to maintain a diverse set of equipment to process the flow of wafers, dies, packaged parts, and boards running through factories. OSAT and ... » read more

Test Challenges Mount As Demands For Reliability Increase
By Anne Meixner - 07 Mar, 2023 - Comments: 0

An emphasis of improving semiconductor quality is beginning to spread well beyond just data centers and automotive applications, where ICs play a role in mission- and safety-critical applications. But this focus on improved reliability is ratcheting up pressure throughout the test community, from lab to fab and into the field, in products where transistor density continues to grow — and wh... » read more

Hunting For Hardware-Related Errors In Data Centers
By Anne Meixner - 07 Feb, 2023 - Comments: 2

The semiconductor industry is urgently pursuing design, monitoring, and testing strategies to help identify and eliminate hardware defects that can cause catastrophic errors. Corrupt execution errors, also known as silent data errors, cannot be fully isolated at test — even with system-level testing — because they occur only under specific conditions. To sort out the environmental condit... » read more

Ramping Up IC Predictive Maintenance
By Anne Meixner - 07 Feb, 2023 - Comments: 0

The chip industry is starting to add technology that can predict impending failures early enough to stave off serious problems, both in manufacturing and in the field. Engineers increasingly are employing in-circuit monitors embedded in SoC designs to catch device failures earlier in the production flow. But for ICs in the field, data tracing from design to application use only recently has ... » read more

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