Automotive Chip Shortages: An Assembly Perspective


Since March 2020, the pandemic has brought on scarcity in odd goods like toilet paper, baking flour and exercise equipment. The latest casualty is the auto industry as car production across the world has been hobbled by chip shortages. While much has been written about the role of semiconductor suppliers, foundries, wafer fab equipment, fires, and snowstorms in the chip shortages, we should als... » read more

Adding Value With Unit Level Traceability (ULT) In Automotive Packaging


Automotive product traceability has existed in one form or another for several decades. Traceability generally refers to tracking and tracing each component that comprises every subsystem in a car. Traditionally, this has been achieved with direct part marking on mechanical or electronic components, using 1D or 2D barcodes or radio-frequency identification (RFID). Since vehicle recalls are cost... » read more

Managing Wafer Retest


Every wafer test touch-down requires a balance between a good electrical contact and preventing damage to the wafer and probe card. Done wrong, it can ruin a wafer and the customized probe card and result in poor yield, as well as failures in the field. Achieving this balance requires good wafer probing process procedures as well as monitoring of the resulting process parameters, much of it ... » read more

Testing Analog Circuits Becoming More Difficult


Foundries and packaging houses are wrestling how to control heat in the testing phase, particularly as devices continue to shrink and as thermally sensitive analog circuits are added into SoCs and advanced packages to support everything from RF to AI. The overriding problem is that heat can damage chips or devices under test. That's certainly true for digital chips developed at advanced node... » read more

Making Chip Packaging More Reliable


Packaging houses are readying the next wave of IC packages, but these products must prove to be reliable before they are incorporated into systems. These packages involve several advanced technologies, such as 2.5D/3D, chiplets and fan-out, but vendors also are working on new versions of more mature package types, like wirebond and leadframe technologies. As with previous products, packaging... » read more

Advanced Packaging For Improved Network Communications


The global demand for data increases day-by-day. At the same time, the data transmission rate will increase to exceed 1 Terabits per second (Tbps) near the middle of this decade. To address this situation and provide a third alternative, engineers are increasingly looking into the chiplet approach with multiple smaller dies integrated in a single package. Only the logic portion that needs to... » read more

AI In Inspection, Metrology, And Test


AI/ML is creeping into multiple processes within the fab and packaging houses, although not necessarily for the purpose it was originally intended. The chip industry is just beginning to learn where AI makes sense and where it doesn't. In general, AI works best as a tool in the hands of someone with deep domain expertise. AI can do certain things well, particularly when it comes to pattern m... » read more

What Goes Wrong In Advanced Packages


Advanced packaging may be the best way forward for massive improvements in performance, lower power, and different form factors, but it adds a whole new set of issues that were much better understood when Moore's Law and the ITRS roadmap created a semi-standardized path forward for the chip industry. Different advanced packaging options — system-in-package, fan-outs, 2.5D, 3D-IC — have a... » read more

Chip Board Interaction Analysis Of 22nm FD-SOI Technology In WLP


Recently, Wafer Level Packaging (WLP) has been in high demand, especially in mobile device applications as a path to enable miniaturization while maintaining good electrical performance. The relatively inexpensive package cost and simplified supply chain are encouraging other industries to adapt WLP capabilities for radio frequency (RF), communications/sensing (mmWave) and automotive applicatio... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Automotive/Mobility Chip-telemetry company proteanTecs has joined TSMC’s IP Alliance Program, which puts proteanTecs’ Universal Chip Telemetry (UCT) IP into TSMC’s catalog of production-proven IP. UCT is a monitoring system designed directly into chips to pull measurements from inside the chip throughout its lifecycle, including after placement in systems in the field. Monitoring the hea... » read more

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