category: Manufacturing, Packaging and Materials

category: Auto, Security & Edge AI

Challenges In Testing Photonics In Chips
By Ed Sperling - 21 Nov, 2025 - Comments: 0

The semiconductor industry has spent decades improving reliability and consistency by standardizing when and how to test it, how to collect critical data from those tests, and what to do with that data. But electrical test data is very different from silicon photonics, which is being bundled into these SoCs and multi-die assemblies alongside traditional electrical components. Aftkhar Aslam, CEO... » read more

Overcoming BEOL Patterning Challenges At The 3nm Node
By Assawer Soussou - 20 Nov, 2025 - Comments: 0

As complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) area shrinks 50% from one node to the next, interconnect critical dimensions (CD) and pitch (or spacing) are under tight demands. At the N3 node, where metal pitch dimensions must be at or below 18 nm,1,2 one of the main interconnect challenges is securing sufficient process margins for CD and edge placement error (EPE). Achieving the... » read more

Advanced Packaging Traceability And Root Cause Analysis
By Aftkhar Aslam - 20 Nov, 2025 - Comments: 0

The semiconductor industry is undergoing a profound transformation. What once centered on single-die silicon packaged in QFN or BGA formats has evolved into a landscape of multi-die integration, chiplets, 3D stacking, and photonics coupling. These advanced packaging architectures are redefining design, manufacturing, and test paradigms—enabling new levels of performance, efficiency, and funct... » read more

Chiplet Integration and Testing: Key Lessons for Next-Gen Semiconductor Packaging
By Vineet Pancholi - 20 Nov, 2025 - Comments: 0

The Chiplet Era Has Arrived The floodgates for chiplet-based design have officially opened. Over the past several quarters, manufacturing test flows have been validating 2.5D package architectures, and production volumes are ramping up. These designs promise flexibility and performance, but they also introduce new test sensitivities—electrical, thermal, and mechanical—that challenge tradit... » read more

Adding Cost, Cycle Time, And Carbon Footprint To PPA Design Targets
By Shela Aboud - 20 Nov, 2025 - Comments: 0

When engineers start designing a new semiconductor technology and fabrication process, they set targets to define what they are trying to achieve to meet the market demands and beat competitive offerings. Traditionally, they have used the metrics of power, performance, and area (PPA). This post examines how additional design targets are mandated by today’s deep submicron nodes and how develop... » read more

New Panel Production Efforts Target Interposer Costs
By Bryon Moyer - 20 Nov, 2025 - Comments: 0

The rising cost of increasingly large interposers is spurring renewed interest in panel-level manufacturing, which for years has hobbled along due to the massive and collective effort required by the chip industry to change formats. Several companies are developing their own processes, although there is currently no commercial production. And a new consortium called Joint3, spearheaded by Ja... » read more

Operator Shortage? Intelligent Machine Vision Can Give More And Better Wafer Inspection
By Errol Akomer - 20 Nov, 2025 - Comments: 0

Right now, wafer manufacturers are having serious problems in finding and retaining operators. And they're desperately looking for ways to keep their fabs running effectively. Fortunately, machine vision can offer a smart solution. To see how it works, let’s first look at the basic fab workflow and check out some opportunities for improvement… How to improve ADI In a typical fab, after... » read more

Machine Learning Tools Accelerate Materials Discovery
By Katherine Derbyshire - 20 Nov, 2025 - Comments: 0

Literature searches, simulations, and practical experiments have been part of the materials science toolkit for decades, but the last few years have seen an explosion of machine learning-driven software tools that promise to accelerate all three. Many of the challenges facing the semiconductor manufacturing industry are fundamentally materials science problems. What metal has the lowest resi... » read more

The Thermal Trap: How Dielectrics Limit Device Performance
By Gregory Haley - 20 Nov, 2025 - Comments: 1

The spread of artificial intelligence is forcing an uncomfortable truth on semiconductor manufacturing. Thin films, which are essential for isolating signals and insulating different components and metal layers, are becoming heat traps as physical dimensions continue to shrink in chips used inside AI data centers. That, in turn, is limiting how fast these chips can process data and increasing t... » read more

Navigating Geopolitical Shifts And AI-Driven Growth: Insights From The SEMICON West 2025 Market Symposium
By Clark Tseng - 20 Nov, 2025 - Comments: 0

By Clark Tseng and Nishita Rao The 2025 SEMICON West Market Symposium brought together leading analysts and strategists to decode the powerful forces shaping the global semiconductor market. Building on last year’s focus on fabless growth and workforce initiatives, this year’s sessions centered on the rising influence of geopolitics, trade policy, and AI-driven investment. Experts from... » read more

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