category: Test, Measurement and Analytics

category: Auto, Security & Edge AI

Image Sensors Are Everywhere And The Implications For Test Are Significant
By Tom Chambers - 11 Apr, 2023 - Comments: 0

In February of 2021, the NASA Perseverance rover actively navigated a fully-autonomous entry and descent to successfully land in the Jezero Crater on Mars, using a brand-new navigational system developed by NASA – Terrain-Relative Navigation. The delay between mission control and the rover was about 11 minutes so a human-guided remote landing was not possible. Previous missions had to rely o... » read more

Integrating Siloed Data In Semiconductor Manufacturing
By Antonija Zagar - 13 Mar, 2023 - Comments: 0

In semiconductor manufacturing, huge amounts of data are generated and collected at every step in multiple production areas, with data coming from wafer fab, probe/testing, assembly, and final test. That data is usually stored separately in its respective manufacturing department, isolated from other departments. In order to analyze the production data and make better decisions, yield an... » read more

Metrology Strategies For 2nm Processes
By Laura Peters - 07 Mar, 2023 - Comments: 3

Metrology and wafer inspection processes are changing to keep up with evolving and new device applications. While fab floors still have plenty of OCD tools, ellipsometers, and CD-SEMs, new systems are taking on the increasingly 3D nature of structures and the new materials they incorporate. For instance, processes like hybrid bonding, 3D NAND flash devices, and nanosheet FETs are pushing the bo... » read more

Test Challenges Mount As Demands For Reliability Increase
By Anne Meixner - 07 Mar, 2023 - Comments: 0

An emphasis of improving semiconductor quality is beginning to spread well beyond just data centers and automotive applications, where ICs play a role in mission- and safety-critical applications. But this focus on improved reliability is ratcheting up pressure throughout the test community, from lab to fab and into the field, in products where transistor density continues to grow — and wh... » read more

Addressing Total Overlay Drift In Advanced IC Substrate (AICS) Packaging
By Keith Best - 07 Mar, 2023 - Comments: 0

For years, many in the semiconductor industry have focused on the march toward advanced nodes. As these nodes have decreased in size, the size of input/output (I/O) bumps on the chip has grown smaller. As these bumps shrink, their ability to mate directly to printed circuit boards (PCB) diminishes, which, in turn, leads to the need for an intermediary substrate. Enter the advanced IC substrate ... » read more

Compiler Optimization Made Easy
By Nozar Nozarian - 07 Mar, 2023 - Comments: 0

In a previous blog post, we discussed the benefits of using automation to maximize the performance of a system. One use case I mentioned was compiler flag mining, and the fact that performance is available beyond the standard optimization flags provided by most compilers. Getting to this untapped performance is a difficult problem to solve, but fortunately there is an easy way. A universe of o... » read more

Advanced Digital Process Nodes Drive Semiconductor Test Innovations
By Regan Mills - 07 Mar, 2023 - Comments: 0

Global internet traffic is growing exponentially, with no sign of slowing, and this demand is driving the evolution of the semiconductor industry. The appetite for more and more data requires sensors for capturing the data, networks for moving the data, storage, and processing power to analyze the data. As the demand for data grows, the underlying technologies must advance to not only meet toda... » read more

Test Gets Ready For Wi-Fi 7
By Jan Ermert - 07 Mar, 2023 - Comments: 0

New test solutions are emerging to address the test challenges associated with the forthcoming Wi-Fi 7 standard. Wi-Fi 7 covers the (so far, for Wi-Fi) unused frequency range between 6 GHz and 7.125 GHz, using up to 4096-QAM modulation schemes and up to 320MHz channel bandwidth (see figure 1). Fig. 1: Wi-Fi band ranges are shown here, including the 3x increase in bandwidth enabled by a... » read more

New Wafer-Like And Reticle-Like Sensors Deliver Fast, Easy Measurements Inside The Process Chamber
By CyberOptics - 07 Mar, 2023 - Comments: 0

Setup and maintenance operations for semiconductor manufacturing tools can be tedious, time-consuming, and expensive, incurring both direct costs for personnel and resources and indirect costs for lost tool time during extended commissioning of new tools and requalification of repaired or serviced tools. Wafer-like (and reticle-like) sensors (WaferSense® from CyberOptics) provide fast, easy ac... » read more

Standards: The Next Step For Silicon Photonics
By Karen Heyman - 07 Mar, 2023 - Comments: 0

Testing silicon photonics is becoming more critical and more complicated as the technology is used in new applications ranging from medicine to cryptography, lidar, and quantum computing, but how to do that in a way that is both consistent and predictable is still unresolved. For the past three decades, photonics largely has been an enabler for high-speed communications, a lucrative market t... » read more

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