Achieving Zero Defect Manufacturing Part 3: Prevention Of Defects


The concept of zero defect manufacturing has been around for decades, arising first in the aerospace and defense industry. Since then, this manufacturing approach has been adopted by the automotive industry, and it has only grown in importance as the sector transitions to electric vehicles. Given the role semiconductors play in today’s vehicles, and will play in the future, it is no surprise ... » read more

Precise Control Needed For Copper Plating And CMP


Chipmakers are relying on machine learning for electroplating and wafer cleaning at leading-edge process nodes, augmenting traditional fault detection/classification and statistical process control in order to extend the usefulness of copper interconnects. Copper is well understood and easy to work with, but it is running out of steam. At 5nm and below, copper plating tools are struggling to... » read more

Predicting And Preventing Process Drift


Increasingly tight tolerances and rigorous demands for quality are forcing chipmakers and equipment manufacturers to ferret out minor process variances, which can create significant anomalies in device behavior and render a device non-functional. In the past, many of these variances were ignored. But for a growing number of applications, that's no longer possible. Even minor fluctuations in ... » read more

Smart Manufacturing Makes Gains In Chip Industry


Lights out manufacturing is gaining steam across the semiconductor industry, accelerating productivity, improving quality, and reducing costs and environment impact. These benefits are the result of years of strategic investments in technologies like machine-to-machine communication, data analytics, and robotics to achieve higher levels of autonomy. Semiconductor factories have long depen... » read more

Nip The Defect In The Bud


As technology nodes shrink, end users are designing systems where each chip element is being targeted for a specific technology and manufacturing node. While designing chip functionality to address specific technology nodes optimizes a chip’s performance regarding that functionality, this performance comes at a cost: additional chips will need to be designed, developed, processed, and assembl... » read more

Smart Manufacturing In Fabs


Not long after STMicroelectronics opened its first semiconductor plant in Singapore more than 50 years ago, a facility chiefly focused on chip assembly and packaging, the company realized that it had constructed the site in an area with a blossoming chip ecosystem with a bright future. Before long, the company became the first to start a wafer fab facility in the so-called Little Red Dot. To... » read more