Chip Industry Week In Review


By Susan Rambo, Karen Heyman, and Liz Allan The Biden-Harris administration designated 31 Tech Hubs across the U.S. this week, focused on industries including autonomous systems, quantum computing, biotechnology, precision medicine, clean energy advancement, and semiconductor manufacturing. The Department of Commerce (DOC) also launched its second Tech Hubs Notice of Funding Opportunity. ... » read more

Chip Industry Talent Shortage Drives Academic Partnerships


Universities around the world are forming partnerships with semiconductor companies and governments to help fill open and future positions, to keep curricula current and relevant, and to update and expand skills for working engineers. Talent shortages repeatedly have been cited as the number one challenge for the chip industry. Behind those concerns are several key drivers, and many more dom... » read more

Using Smart Data To Boost Semiconductor Reliability


The chip industry is looking to AI and data analytics to improve yield, operational efficiency, and reduce the overall cost of designing and manufacturing complex devices. In fact, SEMI estimates its members could capture more than $60B in revenues associated through smart data use and AI. Getting there, however, requires overcoming a number of persistent obstacles. Smart data utilization is... » read more

Integration Challenges For ATE Data


Tighter integration of automatic test equipment (ATE) into semiconductor manufacturing, so that data from one process can be seamlessly leveraged by another, holds significant promise to boost manufacturing efficiency and yield. The challenge is selling this concept to fabs, packaging houses, and their customers. Data involving yield parameters, process variations, and intricate details abou... » read more

Comparison Of State-Of-The-Art Models For Socket Pin Defect Detection


This article is adapted from a presentation at TestConX, March 5-8, 2023, Mesa, AZ, by Vijayakumar Thangamariappan, Nidhi Agrawal, Jason Kim, Constantinos Xanthopoulos, Ira Leventhal, and Ken Butler, Advantest America Inc., and Joe Xiao, Essai, Advantest Group. Test sockets have a key role to play in the semiconductor test industry. A socket serves as the critical interface between a teste... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


By Jesse Allen, Liz Allan, and Gregory Haley A potential government shutdown beginning in November would be "massively disruptive" for the Commerce Department as it continues to disburse critical funding featured in the CHIPS Act to boost semiconductor research and development in the U.S., according to Secretary Gina Raimondo. Global semiconductor industry sales totaled $44 billion in Aug... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


By Susan Rambo, Liz Allan, and Gregory Haley. TSMC rolled out the second version of its 3Dblox, which creates an infrastructure for stacking chiplets and other necessary components in a package, along with a standardized way of achieving that. Two novel features are chiplet mirroring for design reuse, and what is basically sandbox for power and thermal analysis of different design elements. ... » read more

What Happened To Portable Stimulus?


In June 2018, Accellera released the initial version of the Portable Test and Stimulus Standard (PSS), a new verification language that was slated to be the first new abstraction defined within EDA for a couple of decades. So what happened to it? Apart from a few updates at DVCon, there appears to be little talk about it today. However, the industry has its head down trying to make it work, ... » read more

Fab And Field Data Transforming Manufacturing Processes


The ability to capture, process, and analyze data in the field is transforming semiconductor metrology and testing, providing invaluable insight into a product's performance in real-time and under real-world conditions and use cases. Historically, data that encapsulates parameters such as power consumption, temperature, voltages, currents, timing, and other characteristics, was confined to d... » read more

Customizing IC Test To Improve Yield And Reliability


Testing the performance and power of semiconductors as they come off the production line is beginning to shift left in the fab, reversing a long-standing trend of assessing chips just prior to shipping. While this may sound straightforward, it's a difficult challenge which, if successful, will have broad implications for the entire design-through-manufacturing flow. Manufacturers typically g... » read more

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