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

Understanding Optical Inspection For CIS


The demand for smartphone cameras, video conferencing, surveillance and autonomous driving has fueled explosive growth of CMOS image sensor (CIS) manufacturing in the last decade. While CIS becomes an increasingly important element in the production of today’s consumer electronics, there are unique challenges in production that must be addressed. As pixel sizes shrink, we see an inverse relat... » read more

Chasing Test Escapes In IC Manufacturing


The number of bad chips that slip through testing and end up in the field can be significantly reduced before those devices ever leave the fab, but the cost of developing the necessary tests and analyzing the data has sharply limited adoption. Determining an acceptable test escape metric for an IC is essential to improving the yield-to-quality ratio in chip manufacturing, but what exactly is... » read more

Acoustic Metrology for Fine Pitch Microbumps in 3D IC


The continuing shift to 3D integration requires formation of electrical interconnects between multiple vertically stacked Si devices to enable high speed, high bandwidth connections. Microbumps and through silicon vias (TSVs) enable the high-density interconnects for die-to-die and die-to-wafer stacking for different applications. In this paper, we present acoustic metrology techniques for the ... » read more

Developers Turn To Analog For Neural Nets


Machine-learning (ML) solutions are proliferating across a wide variety of industries, but the overwhelming majority of the commercial implementations still rely on digital logic for their solution. With the exception of in-memory computing, analog solutions mostly have been restricted to universities and attempts at neuromorphic computing. However, that’s starting to change. “Everyon... » read more

Sharing Secure Chip Data For Analytics


New approaches and standards are being developed to securely share manufacturing and test data across the supply chain, moves that have long been considered critical to the reliability of end devices and faster time to yield and profitability. It will take time before these methods become widespread in the IC supply chain. But there is increasing agreement these kinds of measures are essenti... » read more

How Do Machines Learn?


We depend, or hope to depend, on machines, especially computers, to do many things, from organizing our photos to parking our cars. Machines are becoming less and less "mechanical" and more and more "intelligent." Machine learning has become a familiar phrase to many people in advanced manufacturing. The next natural question people may ask is: How do machines learn? Recognizing diverse obje... » read more

Monitoring Chips On Many Levels


Monitoring is an important trend for optimizing yield, performance, and uptime in systems that use complex integrated circuits, but not all monitoring is the same. In fact, there are multiple levels of monitors. In many cases, they can be used together to help solve problems when something is amiss. They also can be used to help identify who in the supply chain owns the fix. “If the sys... » read more

Advantages Of Picosecond Ultrasonic Technology For Advanced RF Metrology


This paper is from China Semiconductor Technology International Conference (CSTIC). Picosecond Ultrasonics (PULSE Technology) has been widely adopted as the tool-of-record for metal film thickness metrology in semiconductor fabs around the world. It provides unique advantages, such as being a rapid, non-contact, non-destructive technology, and has capabilities for simultaneous multiple layer... » read more

What Goes Wrong In Advanced Packages


Advanced packaging may be the best way forward for massive improvements in performance, lower power, and different form factors, but it adds a whole new set of issues that were much better understood when Moore's Law and the ITRS roadmap created a semi-standardized path forward for the chip industry. Different advanced packaging options — system-in-package, fan-outs, 2.5D, 3D-IC — have a... » read more

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