Innovative Scalable Design-Based Care Area Methodology For Defect Monitoring In Production


By Ian Tolle, GlobalFoundries, and Ankit Jain, KLA-Tencor Abstract The use of design-based care areas on inspection tools [1, 2] to characterize defects has been well established in recent years. However, the implementation has generally been limited to specific engineering use cases, due to the complexity involved with care area creation and inspection recipe setup. Furthermore, creating, ... » read more

Enhancing The Energy-Efficient Production of Tempered Glass By Using Simulation-Based Optimization


In many industrial manufacturing processes energy use is one of the most important cost factors. Especially in energy-intensive industries like steel production or glass processing minimizing energy use is a key measure to save resources and reduce manufacturing costs. The research project OptPlanEnergie concentrates on the production of tempered glass. In this project we apply simulation and o... » read more

Europe’s New R&D Program


European Union (EU) research, development and innovation programs have proved successful in recent decades. The current framework program (FP) Horizon 2020, with its 80 billion EUR total budget – around 17 billion EUR of which is allocated for Industrial Leadership – has produced unparalleled collaboration opportunities that no single European country can match on its own. FPs are strate... » read more

Automotive IC Industry Trends


A trend that will continue in 2018 is the rise of the smart, autonomous car. As consumers and regulators demand more capability from automobiles, semiconductors have become the most critical part of these innovative solutions. But these chips, designed to bring safety and economy to the car’s operation, also bring complexity and higher requirements for reliability, requirements that have not ... » read more

Reflections On 2017: Manufacturing And Markets


People love to make predictions, and most of the time they have it easy, but at Semiconductor Engineering, we ask them to look back on the predictions they make each year and to assess how close to the mark they were. To see what they missed and what surprised them. Not everyone accepts our offer to grade themselves, but many have this year. This is the first of two parts that looks at the pred... » read more

More Volatility Ahead


The entire semiconductor industry had a wild ride on the stock market this week, plunging on Wednesday and recovering on Thursday. This is just a sign of things to come. The cause of this week's volatility can be tied directly to a Morgan Stanley report, which said that NAND prices have peaked and will begin dropping at the beginning of 2018 because supply has caught up with demand. The repo... » read more

Tech Talk: Smart Manufacturing


Tom Salmon, vice president of collaborative technology platforms at SEMI, examines the electronics supply chain and what the industry organization is doing to pull all of the pieces together. https://youtu.be/jWX9mayMaZo Related Stories Smart Manufacturing Gains Momentum Problems remain for legacy infrastructure, but adoption will continue to grow as gaps are identified and plugged. ... » read more

Outlier Detection


With increasing focus on quality and reliability across all segments beyond just automotive, medical and mil-aero, it is more critical than ever for companies to leverage every byte of test data at their disposal to ensure that they deliver the lowest possible DPPM (defective parts per million) rates to their customers. Semiconductor manufacturing operations now generate up to 100TB of test ... » read more

Changing Direction In Chip Design


Andrzej Strojwas, chief technologist at PDF Solutions and professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University—and the winner of this year's Phil Kaufman Award for distinguished contributions to EDA—sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about device scaling, why the semiconductor industry will begin to fragment around new architectures and packaging, and ... » read more

TSMC: 10nm To Be Greater Than 10% Of 2017 Wafer Revenue


TSMC’s financial results for the 4th Quarter of 2016 were released on January 11, 2017 (PST) and showed that year-over-year fourth quarter revenue increased 28.8% and simultaneously net income and diluted EPS both increased 37.6%.  In U.S. dollars, TSMC’s fourth quarter revenue was $8.25 billion. TSMC's CFO, Ms. Lora Ho, reported that 2016 was a good year for TSMC and that the company set ... » read more

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