Making Light More Reliable


The buzz around photonics in packages and between packages is growing. Now the question is whether it will work as expected, and where it will be useful. Replacing electrical with optical signals has been on the technology horizon for some time. Light moves faster through fiber than electrons through copper. How much faster depends upon the diameter of the wires, the substrate and interconne... » read more

Extreme Quality Semiconductor Manufacturing


By Ben Tsai and Cathy Perry Sullivan Across the full range of semiconductor device types and design nodes, there is a drive to produce chips with significantly higher quality. Automotive, IoT and other industrial applications require chips that achieve very high reliability over a long period of time, and some of these chips must maintain reliable performance while operating in an environmen... » read more

Logic Chip, Heal Thyself


If a single fault can kill a logic chip, that doesn’t bode well for longevity of complex multi-chip systems. Obsolescence in chips is not just an industry ploy to sell more chips. It is a fact of physics that chips don’t last more than a few years, especially if overheated, and hit with higher voltage than it can stand. The testing industry does a great job finding defects during manufac... » read more

Using Machine Learning To Gain Data Insights


Today’s consumers have little appetite for networks that go down, for electronic devices that fail, and for any kind of digital service that doesn’t deliver as promised every time. Reliability is no longer a nice-to-have. It's  a key feature. The continued scaling of advanced electronics and chip manufacturing technologies, however, makes reliability harder to achieve — even as expectati... » read more

More Data, More Problems In Automotive


The race toward increasing levels of autonomy is being hampered by competitive concerns over sharing data across the automotive supply chain. Pushing past the initial ADAS levels into full autonomy is expected to take more than a decade, but the infrastructure for those systems, and making sure all assisted and autonomous vehicles work with other vehicles, is under development today. Still, ... » read more

An Optimal Path To DFT Automation


To keep up with time-to-market demands when SoCs keep increasing in size and complexity requires the adoption of better DFT flows and technologies. One of the most successful changes in design-for-test (DFT) flows in recent years has been the deployment of hierarchical DFT. Taking the divide-and-conquer approach delivers real savings in test time and cost, plus keeps DFT out of the critical pat... » read more

Failure Analysis Becoming Critical To Reliability


Failure analysis is rapidly becoming a complex, costly and increasingly time-consuming must-do task as demand rises for reliability across a growing range of devices used in markets ranging from automotive to 5G. From the beginning, failure analysis has been about finding out what went wrong in semiconductor design and manufacturing. Different approaches, tools and equipment have improved ov... » read more

6 Signs You Need A Yield Management System


We often speak to companies who don’t know if they need yield management software yet. While most semiconductor companies need to invest in yield management, there could be instances where you’ll get by without one for a while. This article is for companies that use an internal option (such as Excel or JMP) and those who don’t have yield management at all. We will share the six most obvio... » read more

Optimal End-to-End DFT Automation With Tessent Connect


With the growth in design size and complexity, DFT engineers began adopting new methods to reduce DFT implementation time, reduce test costs, and reduce risks to design schedules by removing DFT from the critical path to tapeout. The primary method to accomplish large improvements to DFT efficiency is through a divide-and-conquer approach supported by Tessent’s RTL-based, hierarchical DFT ins... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Feb. 10


Accelerating and cooling muons Using a novel particle accelerator, a group for the first time have observed a phenomenon called muon ionization cooling–an event that could give researchers a better understanding of matter and the universe. Muons are obscure sub-atomic particles. This experiment could pave the way towards the development of new and powerful muon particle accelerators. Thes... » read more

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