Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


OEMs For some time, the automotive industry has suffered due to chip shortages in the market. And the chip shortages are spreading into other markets. In the latest news, GM plans to idle key truck plants amid chip shortages, according to a report from Bloomberg. “GM said eight of its 14 North American assembly plants will experience shutdowns this month because of chip shortages, includi... » read more

Debugging Point-to-Point Resistance Using Contribution By Layer In IC Validator PERC


PERC Point-to-point resistance (P2P resistance) functionality is a crucial EDA technology to enable complex P2P effective resistance measurement along ESD paths in automation for foundry qualified ESD/Latch-up checker or in-house custom checker. This technology is applied to the entire chip, block, and IP designs on cell or transistor level layout database. Since the ESD path count could grow t... » 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

Meeting Automotive Functional Safety Requirements With GPIOs


Automotive OEMs are building advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) to improve safety. ADAS systems must meet stringent performance, power, and cost requirements, so the system-on-chips (SoCs) that make up ADAS and passenger safety systems integrate advanced protocols and are built on leading edge finFET process technologies. Designers of this new class of ADAS SoCs are challenged to meet IS... » read more

Many Chiplet Challenges Ahead


Over the past couple of months, Semiconductor Engineering has looked into several aspects of 2.5D and 3D system design, the emerging standards and steps that the industry is taking to make this more broadly adopted. This final article focuses on the potential problems and what remains to be addressed before the technology becomes sustainable to the mass market. Advanced packaging is seen as ... » read more

Evaluate ESD Robustness With Cell-Based P2P/CD Verification


Detecting and verifying an ESD structure can be challenging for designers without specialized ESD experience. The Calibre PERC reliability platform offers cell-based P2P and CD checks that can be used to quickly, accurately, and easily evaluate ESD robustness without the need for advanced ESD expertise. To read more, click here. » read more

ESD P2P And CD Verification Doesn’t Have To Be Hard


As a designer or verification engineer, you’re fighting the effects of electrostatic discharge (ESD) in your integrated circuit (IC) designs all the time. ESD is one of those frustrating issues that can challenge even the most experienced designers. Once an IC is in the market, unexpected electrical shorts will cause immediate failure or dielectric breakdown will result in gradual circuit deg... » read more

Multiphysics Reliability Signoff For Next-Generation Automotive Electronics Systems


Automotive electronics systems depend on an ever-increasing number of electronic sensors and processing elements, which allow for 360-degree surveillance and object identification/classification. Designing and verifying these systems is, however, as complex as the systems themselves. This white paper examines how automotive chip designers can achieve the stringent safety and reliability requ... » read more

Is Common Resistance Affecting Your Analog Design Reliability And Performance?


Integrated circuit (IC) design reliability has always been important and essential to market success. After all, if no one could count on your product to operate as designed, and for as long as intended, there wouldn’t be many buyers! However, given the increase in the types and complexity of design applications, coupled with the increasing technological challenge of manufacturing at advance... » read more

ESD Requirements Are Changing


Standards for specifying a chip’s ability to withstand electrostatic discharge (ESD) are changing – in some cases, getting tougher, and in others, easing up. ESD protection has been on a path from a one-size-fits-all approach to one where a signal’s usage helps to determine what kind of protection it should get. Protecting chips from ESD damage has been a longstanding part of IC design... » read more

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