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

Scalable End-To-End Test Solutions For Today’s Complex SoCs


By Srikanth Venkat Raman and Sri Ganta Today’s highly complex and large system on chip (SoC) devices and systems present many challenges to be addressed from manufacturing tests to the field while meeting stringent requirements for test costs, test quality, yield, debug, and turn-around-times. Scalable and efficient end-to-end test solutions that scale to large and complex SoC design cores... » read more

Tackling Chip Complexity With Integrated System-Level Test Solutions


As the sophistication of semiconductors continues to grow, so does the need for system-level test (SLT) in production to ensure that high-performance processors, chiplets, and other advanced devices function as expected in real-world environments. Once seen primarily as a fallback to catch what traditional automated test equipment (ATE) missed, SLT has now become a mission-critical step for val... » read more

The Real-World Impact Of Silicon Lifecycle Management On Chip Architectures


Silicon lifecycle management (SLM) is transforming chip architectures, empowering designers to build smarter, more resilient, and secure semiconductor devices by leveraging data from manufacturing to end of life in the field. That data can be used to improve future designs, reduce margin, and continuously optimize performance and power efficiency throughout a chip's lifetime. Moreover, under... » read more

Chiplet Integration and Testing: Key Lessons for Next-Gen Semiconductor Packaging


The Chiplet Era Has Arrived The floodgates for chiplet-based design have officially opened. Over the past several quarters, manufacturing test flows have been validating 2.5D package architectures, and production volumes are ramping up. These designs promise flexibility and performance, but they also introduce new test sensitivities—electrical, thermal, and mechanical—that challenge tradit... » read more

Integrating Design Verification To Approach Zero Defects


As semiconductor applications in automotive, data center, and high-performance computing grow increasingly mission-critical, the industry faces mounting pressure to achieve near-perfect manufacturing test coverage—often exceeding 99%. Yet, meeting stringent zero-defect defective parts per million (DPPM) targets remains a formidable challenge. Traditional structural testing methods frequently ... » read more

Using AI/ML To Find And Correlate IC Test Data


What causes low yield in wafers? Usually it's due to design or process changes, but sometimes yield issues occur even if there haven't been any changes from one manufacturing lot to the next. Finding the cause requires some sleuthing, and the best approach for pinpointing problems is to mine design, process, and manufacturing data, and to correlate that data by date and time, by which equipment... » read more

Revolutionizing Chip Testing: Navigating Bottlenecks


In today's rapidly evolving semiconductor landscape, System-on-Chips (SoCs) are becoming increasingly complex, integrating multiple processing cores, specialized accelerators and vast memory arrays. This escalating complexity, while enabling incredible functionality, presents significant challenges for Design-for-Test (DFT) engineers. Ensuring the thorough and efficient testing of these intrica... » read more

Making The Most of Test Resources


Semiconductor testing is undergoing multiple paradigm changes at once with the common goals of producing more known good die per month with low test cost. Achieving these goals requires a delicate balance between yield, quality, and test times. There are multiple ways to go about making better use of existing resources, many of which involve an increasing use of design for test (DFT) methods... » read more

Silicon Lifecycle Management Gains Traction, But It’s Complicated


Silicon lifecycle management (SLM) is gaining ground in semiconductor design and test by leveraging specialized on-die sensors and analytics engines to improve power, performance, yield, and reliability. Most modern SoCs mitigate the guesswork by leveraging DFT, which includes adding memory built-in self-test (BiST) or improving functional coverage, but these tests were meant for verifying c... » read more

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