Navigating Timing Margins Like Waze


Remember the pre-smartphone days, before navigation apps had our backs? Thanks to a lack of real-time visibility, ‘arriving early’ was the go-to strategy to avoid arriving late. Factor in too much ‘holdup time’ and you’d arrive a little too early. There’s nothing worse than nervously burning off an excess 30 minutes over a coffee you really didn’t need. Today you wouldn’t ... » read more

RMAs: Root Problem Found


For decades, costs of production and maintenance have been driven down through manufacturing, process and logistical innovation, creating more breathing room for margin to maintain viable growth. There are other costs, however, that we seemingly accept as inevitable and simply get better at factoring in as par-for-the-course, or ‘eggs broken’ to make the omelet. The ubiquitous presence of ... » read more

How To Improve DPPM By 10X Without Affecting Yield


Chips today are under immense pressure. With wider process variation manifested at wafer and die levels in single-digit nodes, highly complex designs, and effects of application and system integration, it’s no wonder the electronics value chain is becoming ever more reliant on expensive guard-bands. The ecosystem is not yet equipped to find all existing defects during test. So while quality e... » read more

Lessons In Monitoring System Performance


At proteanTecs, we set out to revolutionize electronics with a breakthrough approach to address the challenges that come with scale: Deep Data monitoring of the health & performance of systems, from design to field. Knowledge and education are profoundly rooted in our core values. However, as the circumstances of COVID-19 unfold, we are following the guidelines of the World Health Organi... » 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

Improving Reliability Monitoring Of High-Bandwidth Memory


As the quest for increased bandwidth and speed continues, multi-die technologies with advanced memory architectures are introduced. As the complexity of these heterogenous packaging continues to develop, new reliability challenges arise. A new approach to HBM subsystem monitoring and repair provides advanced in-field reliability assurance. By applying analytics to data created by on-chip Age... » read more

From Womb To Tomb: A Lifetime Of Chip Data In A Common Language


Every integrated circuit (IC) has a lifetime of stories to tell. From design through the end of a chip’s life, it can let us know what’s happening all along the way, providing we give it a voice and the language to do so. But until we can gain access to this data, the lives of these ICs remain secret. In-chip monitoring opens up those secrets. It helps to optimize performance, and it is esp... » read more

Degradation Monitoring – From Vision to Reality


Reliability physics has historically focused on models for time-to-failure, but that approach is reaching its limit. Those models generally were developed using data gathered from very simple test structures that could be stressed to failure. Today, with electronics playing a such a critical role in our everyday life, failures are no longer an option. The underlying ICs being implemented call f... » read more

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