Money Pours Into New Fabs And Facilities


Fabs, packaging, test and assembly, and R&D all drew major funding in 2023. Companies poured money into offshore locations, such as India and Malaysia, to access a larger workforce and lower costs, while also partnering with governments to secure domestic supply chains amid ongoing geopolitical turmoil. Looking ahead, artificial intelligence (AI), quantum computing, and data applications... » read more

Challenges Grow For CD-SEMs At 5nm And Beyond


CD-SEM, the workhorse metrology tool used by fabs for process control, is facing big challenges at 5nm and below. Traditionally, CD-SEM imaging has relied on a limited number of image frames for averaging, which is necessary both to maintain throughput speeds and to minimize sample damage from the electron beam itself. As dimensions get smaller, these limitations result in higher levels of n... » read more

Research Bits: April 4


Wet-like plasma etching Researchers from Nagoya University and Hitachi developed a new etch method called wet-like plasma etching that combines the selectivity of wet etching with the controllability of dry etching. The researchers say the technique will make it possible to etch complex structures such as metal carbides consisting of titanium (Ti) and aluminum (Al), such as TiC or TiAlC, wh... » read more

Where All The Semiconductor Investments Are Going


Companies and countries are funneling huge sums of money into semiconductor manufacturing, materials, and research — at least a half-trillion dollars over the next decade, and maybe much more — to guarantee a steady supply of chips and know-how to support growth across a wide swath of increasingly data-centric industries. The build-out of a duplicate supply chain that can guarantee capac... » read more

Review of Bumpless Build Cube Using Wafer-on-Wafer & Chip-on-Wafer for Tera-Scale 3D Integration


New research paper titled "Review of Bumpless Build Cube (BBCube) Using Wafer-on-Wafer (WOW) and Chip-on-Wafer (COW) for Tera-Scale Three-Dimensional Integration (3DI)" from researchers at Tokyo Institute of Technology and others. Abstract "Bumpless Build Cube (BBCube) using Wafer-on-Wafer (WOW) and Chip-on-Wafer (COW) for Tera-Scale Three-Dimensional Integration (3DI) is discussed. Bum... » read more

Strategies For Faster Yield Ramps On 5nm Chips


Leading chipmakers TSMC and Samsung are producing 5nm devices in high volume production and TSMC is forging ahead with plans for first 3nm silicon by year end. But to meet such aggressive targets, engineers must identify defects and ramp yield faster than before. Getting a handle on EUV stochastic defects — non-repeating patterning defects such as microbridges, broken lines, or missing con... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Deals AMD plans to purchase cloud startup Pensando for about US $1.9 billion. In a presentation at the SEMI ISS conference this week, AMD CTO Mark Papermaster described Pensando's technology as a "highly programmable packet-processing engine that allows you to speed up systems designed for the data center." Intel, Micron, Analog Devices and MITRE Engenuity formed an alliance to accelerate c... » read more

Highly Selective Etch Rolls Out For Next-Gen Chips


Several etch vendors are starting to ship next-generation selective etch tools, paving the way for new memory and logic devices. Applied Materials was the first vendor to ship a next-gen selective etch system, sometimes called highly-selective etch, in 2016. Now, Lam Research, TEL, and others are shipping tools with highly-selective etch capabilities, in preparation for futuristic devices su... » read more

Fabs Drive Deeper Into Machine Learning


Advanced machine learning is beginning to make inroads into yield enhancement methodology as fabs and equipment makers seek to identify defectivity patterns in wafer images with greater accuracy and speed. Each month a wafer fabrication factory produces tens of millions of wafer-level images from inspection, metrology, and test. Engineers must analyze that data to improve yield and to reject... » read more

AI In Inspection, Metrology, And Test


AI/ML is creeping into multiple processes within the fab and packaging houses, although not necessarily for the purpose it was originally intended. The chip industry is just beginning to learn where AI makes sense and where it doesn't. In general, AI works best as a tool in the hands of someone with deep domain expertise. AI can do certain things well, particularly when it comes to pattern m... » read more

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