Understanding Optical Inspection For CIS


The demand for smartphone cameras, video conferencing, surveillance and autonomous driving has fueled explosive growth of CMOS image sensor (CIS) manufacturing in the last decade. While CIS becomes an increasingly important element in the production of today’s consumer electronics, there are unique challenges in production that must be addressed. As pixel sizes shrink, we see an inverse relat... » read more

How Do Machines Learn?


We depend, or hope to depend, on machines, especially computers, to do many things, from organizing our photos to parking our cars. Machines are becoming less and less "mechanical" and more and more "intelligent." Machine learning has become a familiar phrase to many people in advanced manufacturing. The next natural question people may ask is: How do machines learn? Recognizing diverse obje... » read more

Untangling 3D NAND: Tilt, Registration, And Misalignment


The multiple demands of 3D NAND to enable yield and performance increase in difficulty at each generation. First generation devices, at 24-32 layer pairs, pushed process tools to extremes, going quickly from 10:1 to 40:1 aspect ratios for today’s 64-96 pair single tier devices. The aspect ratios increased as fast as the manufacturing challenges. To continue bit density scaling, processing imp... » read more

Demystifying ADC


ADC stands for automatic defect classification. It’s a software that classifies defects based on image and metadata such as location, ROI, and other information associated with a defect. ADC is not a mysterious black box that’s impossible to understand. Instead, ADC classifies defects the same way a human operator does, by first being trained by an expert. Then, just like human classificati... » read more

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