AI & Energy: Bending The Curve


By Pushkar P. Apte and Melissa Grupen-Shemansky Artificial intelligence (AI) is scaling at a pace that is reshaping semiconductor roadmaps, data center design, and long-term infrastructure strategy. AI promises many economic and social benefits, but the growth comes with an escalating demand for power, and energy has emerged as a major challenge. The AI & energy challenge AI training c... » read more

What’s Really Needed For Advanced Test?


By Greg Prewitt and Marc Jacobs Advanced test has become one of the semiconductor industry's most promising frontiers: adaptive binning, feed-forward models, and real-time analytics pulling signals from mountains of measurement data. But there is a problem hiding underneath all that ambition, and it is neither compute nor algorithm; it is data. More specifically, it is the unglamorous, found... » read more

Breaking The Legacy Trap: How Semiconductor Executives Can Accelerate AI Adoption And Transform IT Applications At The Same Time


The semiconductor industry is facing a strategic paradox. AI has rapidly moved from experimental technology to a competitive necessity promising faster yield improvement, smarter supply chain decisions, and autonomous factory operations. Yet the very systems that semiconductor manufacturers depend on to run their fabs, manage their supply chains, and serve their customers were built for a diffe... » read more

Platform-Led AI Analytics for the Semiconductor Ecosystem


Abstract: Semiconductor manufacturers face a mounting data crisis: modern fabrication facilities generate petabytes of complex, siloed data, yet less than 5% of it is typically used in analytics. Traditional business intelligence tools lack the scalability to handle datasets with millions of parameters, leaving critical yield and quality insights untapped. In this presentation we outline a c... » read more

The Petabyte Problem: How AI Is Finally Making Semiconductor Manufacturing Data Actionable


The semiconductor industry has quietly accumulated one of the most complex data challenges in modern manufacturing, and it has largely been losing the battle to solve it. Modern fabs now generate gigabytes of data per chip across probe, assembly, and test operations. Test programs routinely exceed one million test items. The largest enterprise deployments have crossed the multi-petabyte thre... » read more

Tool And Methodology Changes Coming In Fab And Package Automation


Experts at the table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss what's changing in semiconductor fabs and packaging houses with Michael Lowman, senior product marketing manager for Data Analytics at Cohu; Aftkhar Aslam, CEO at yieldWerx, Woo Young Han, product marketing director at Onto Innovation; and Lihong Cao, senior director of engineering and technical marketing for ASE. What foll... » read more

Wafer Probe Struggles To Adapt To Multi-Die Assemblies


Wafer probe, one of the key processes for ensuring reliability in semiconductor manufacturing, is becoming increasingly unreliable in multi-die assemblies and at leading-edge nodes. For much of the semiconductor industry’s history, wafer probe occupied a stable, largely uncontested role in manufacturing. It was understood as a screening step, an electrical checkpoint to identify failing de... » read more

Semiconductor Manufacturing In The AI Era


At the 2025 PDF Solutions Users Conference, CEO John Kibarian delivered a wide-ranging keynote that positioned the semiconductor industry at a pivotal inflection point, one driven by explosive AI demand but constrained by unprecedented manufacturing complexity. His central message: the path to a trillion-dollar semiconductor industry by 2030 requires fundamentally rethinking how manufacturers c... » read more

The Growing Need For Collaboration Across The Semiconductor Industry


Abstract: AI-driven collaboration is becoming essential for the semiconductor industry to manage its increasingly complex global supply chain. This new model facilitates real-time data sharing and multi-party orchestration, moving beyond conventional, crisis-driven interactions. By leveraging a secure data infrastructure, automated orchestration, and AI agents, companies can automate busines... » read more

Challenges In Testing Photonics In Chips


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

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