Next Challenge: Parts Per Quadrillion


Requirements for purity of the materials used in semiconductor manufacturing are being pushed to unprecedented — and increasingly unprovable — levels as demand for reliability in chips over increasingly longer lifetimes continues to rise. And while this may seem like a remote problem for many parts of the supply chain, it can affect everything from availability of materials needed to make t... » read more

Next Challenge: Known Good Systems


The leading edge of design is heading toward multi-die/multi-chiplet architectures, and an increasing number of mainstream designs likely will follow as processing moves closer to the edge. This doesn't mean every chipmaker will be designing leading-edge chips, of course. But more devices will have at least some leading-edge logic or will be connected over some advanced interconnect scheme t... » read more

Advanced Packaging Makes Testing More Complex


The limits of monolithic integration, together with advances in chip interconnect and packaging technologies, have spurred the growth of heterogeneous advanced packaging where multiple dies are co-packaged using 2.5D and 3D approaches. But this also raises complex test challenges, which are driving new standards and approaches to advanced-package testing. While many of the showstopper issues... » read more

Data Becomes Key For Next-Gen Chips


Data has become vital to understanding the useful life of a semiconductor — and the knowledge gleaned is key to staying competitive beyond Moore’s Law. What's changed is a growing reliance earlier in the design cycle on multiple sources of data, including some from further right in the design-through-manufacturing flow. While this holistic approach may seem logical enough, the semiconduc... » read more

Using Built-In Self-Test Hardware To Satisfy ISO 26262 Safety Requirements


The promise of autonomous vehicles is driving profound changes in the design and testing of automotive semiconductor parts. The ICs for safety-critical applications need to meet the ISO 26262 standard for functional safety. Among the challenges in the design flow has been aligning the metrics for design-for-test and for functional safety. This paper describes using logic built-in-self-test as b... » read more

Using ML In Manufacturing


How to prevent early life failures by applying machine learning to different use cases, and how to interpret models for different tradeoffs on reliability. Jeff David, vice president of AI solutions at PDF Solutions, digs down into how to utilize data to improve reliability. » read more

Spreading Out The Cost At 3nm


The current model for semiconductor scaling doesn't add up. While it's possible that markets will consolidate around a few basic designs, the likelihood is that no single SoC will sell in enough volume to compensate for the increased cost of design, equipment, mask sets and significantly more testing and inspection. In fact, even with slew of derivative chips, it may not be enough to tip the ec... » read more

Probe Expertise For Cryogenic Devices


The promise of quantum computing to solve complex problems far beyond today’s supercomputer capabilities, plus the emergence of high performance image sensors for security, military, and health care use, and other emerging applications are driving the need for test and measurement tools that can operate in extreme low temperatures (below about -150°C down to a few degrees above absolute zero... » read more

Sensors, Data And Machine Learning


Strategies for building reliability into chips and systems are beginning to shift as more sensors are added into these devices and machine learning is applied to that data. In the past, system monitoring relied heavily on MEMS devices for things like acceleration, temperature and positioning (gyroscopes). While those devices are still important, in the past couple years there has been an exp... » read more

Home Analysis Of STDF Data


STDF data files can be very large, often tens of megabytes, sometimes over a gigabyte for a single file. When you’re working from home and only have a desktop tool for analysis, you’ll have to download the data first from your work network. Even if the files are compressed first, they are still large and many times you would be required to analyze dozens of data files to really understand a... » read more

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