Shift Left Strategy For Semiconductor Production Testing


In the fast-paced world of semiconductor manufacturing, achieving higher yields and reducing costs are constant challenges. Ideally, yield should only be impacted by unavoidable defects when everything else is performing as expected. However, when yield reduction occurs due to the process sensitivity of the design, these issues can be detected and, in many cases, corrected. proteanTecs has d... » read more

Improving Reliability In Chips


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss changes in test that address tracing device quality throughout a product’s lifetime with Tom Katsioulas, CEO at Archon Design Solutions and U.S. Department of Commerce IoT advisory board member; Ming Zhang, vice president of R&D Acceleration at PDF Solutions; and Uzi Baruch, chief strategy officer at proteanTecs. What follows are excerpts of t... » read more

Where And When End-to-End Analytics Works


With data exploding across all manufacturing steps, the promise of leveraging it from fab to field is beginning to pay off. Engineers are beginning to connect device data across manufacturing and test steps, making it possible to more easily achieve yield and quality goals at lower cost. The key is knowing which process knob will increase yield, which failures can be detected earlier, and wh... » read more

Big Payback For Combining Different Types Of Fab Data


Collecting and combining diverse data types from different manufacturing processes can play a significant role in improving semiconductor yield, quality, and reliability, but making that happen requires integrating deep domain expertise from various different process steps and sifting through huge volumes of data scattered across a global supply chain. The semiconductor manufacturing IC data... » read more

Enablers And Barriers For Connecting Diverse Data


More data is being collected at every step of the manufacturing process, raising the possibility of combining data in new ways to solve engineering problems. But this is far from simple, and combining results is not always possible. The semiconductor industry’s thirst for data has created oceans of it from the manufacturing process. In addition, semiconductor designs large and small now ha... » read more

Hunting For Open Defects In Advanced Packages


Catching all defects in chip packaging is becoming more difficult, requiring a mix of electrical tests, metrology screening, and various types of inspection. And the more critical the application for these chips, the greater the effort and the cost. Latent open defects continue to be the bane of test, quality, and reliability engineering. Open defects in packages occur at the chip-to-substra... » read more

Cleaning Data For Final Test


John O’Donnell, CEO of yieldHUB, talks about why data integrity is so critical for final test, what can cause it to be less-than-perfect, what’s needed to improve the quality of that data, and how that impacts the overall yield in a fab. » read more

How To Ensure Reliability


Michael Schuldenfrei, corporate technology fellow at OptimalPlus, talks about how to measure quality, why it’s essential to understand all of the possible variables in the testing process, and why outliers are no longer considered sufficient to ensure reliability. » read more