Fleet Management Of Data Center Electronics


Data has become the most valuable resource of our time, with processing, storage and networking being the key assets of the modern digital world. This has fueled a two-decade spread of massive data centers around the globe and a surge in the cloud services they offer people, corporations, and countries alike. New services like video, game streaming, AI and social media push the need for data... » read more

Considerations For 5G Production Test


Like all technology advancements, bringing 5G to market requires an array of supporting tools to ensure the end products meet expectations. It will require significant performance advances in chip technology and manufacturing processes—all the while keeping price/performance at an economically viable level. Earlier this year, FormFactor’s Daniel Bock along with Jeff Damm outlined three c... » read more

Customer Input Guides Tool Development


We’re always looking for high-value items which add to our yield management software without over-complicating or detracting from the core functions. It is an interesting and highly responsible position to be able to take ideas and input from many people, look for common elements in problems and find solutions that can solve many problems. High-value functionality A great example of this ... » read more

No Two Chips Are Alike


As semiconductor processes continue to shrink it’s becoming increasingly challenging to manage the parameters of individual devices not only across the diameter of the wafer, but also across the length of a single chip, especially for a complex chip with a large area. Today’s standard approach to this problem is to assume the worst case and to create a sub-optimal design that accommodates t... » read more

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

Probing From Home


The current stay-at-home, work-from-home situation challenges the semiconductor industry in a way we have never seen before. Social distancing and remote work put operational procedures in place that can be difficult. In a previous post, we shared information on our virtual demos designed to help keep your semiconductor measurements running no matter where you are physically located. In this ... » read more

Adopting Yield Analysis Tools


DisplayLink is a fast growing medium-sized semiconductor fabless company from Cambridge UK. We began working with them a few years ago. We caught up with Shane Zhang, Head of Product Engineering to find out why he works with yieldHUB, the problems we solve and the features he likes most. Tell us about DisplayLink. Our operations team is based in Cambridge, UK. We work with teams, suppli... » 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

Measuring Reflective Surfaces


Manufacturers are adopting automated optical inspection (AOI) systems based on phase shift profilometry (PSP) for applications in advanced packaging processes. Many of these processes use front end-like techniques to create connections among die within a package and from the packaged die to the outside world. The technique offers fast, precise measurements of the 10µm to 100µm features that a... » read more

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