The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Chipmakers Toshiba’s problems have gone from bad to worse. “Toshiba postponed its earnings call by up to one month, and the chairman resigned. The provisional results show large losses in its nuclear power business, while the NAND operations remain very profitable,” said Weston Twigg, an analyst with Pacific Crest Securities, in a research note. “The next few months appear very uncerta... » read more

The Week In Review: IoT


Consortia Optimal+ said this week that it has joined the Industrial Internet Consortium. “The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) will have a tremendous impact on industries worldwide. The application of smart manufacturing, combined with the collection and analysis of in-use/field stage data, will deliver powerful insights to brand owners and enable them to achieve dramatic improvements in... » read more

Addressing Test Time Challenges


Unit test time on automated test equipment (ATE) is one of the major components that affects the total cost of manufacturing for semiconductor suppliers. The test programs for each unit can be comprised of thousands of parametric and functional tests that are performed to screen out defective units or dies. However, tester time is expensive, so suppliers are always looking for ways to reduce th... » read more

Betting On Wafer-Level Fan-Outs


Advanced packaging is starting to gain traction as a commercially viable business model rather than just one more possible option, propelled by the technical difficulties in routing signals at 10nm and 7nm and skyrocketing costs of device scaling on a single die. The inclusion of a [getkc id="202" kc_name="fan-out"] package for logic in Apple's iPhone 7, based on TSMC's Integrated Fan-Out (... » read more

Grappling With Manufacturing Data


As complexity goes up with each new process node, so does the amount of data that is generated, from initial GDSII to photomasks, manufacturing, yield and post-silicon validation. But what happens to that data, and what gets shared, remain a point of contention among companies across the semiconductor ecosystem. The problem is that to speed up the entire design through manufacturing process,... » read more

Gaps Emerge In Test Flows


Gaps are showing up in test flows as chipmakers add more analog content and push into more safety-critical applications, exposing more points at which designs need to be tested as well as weaknesses in current tools and methodologies. The cornerstone of the [getkc id="76" kc_name="IoT"], and connected devices such as self-driving cars, is a heavy reliance on [getkc id="187" kc_name="sensors"... » read more

Data Analytics To Drive IC Shift


The adoption of predictive analytics has the potential to drive the next round of IC industry innovation and growth. Much of the necessary data handling technology is now available from other sectors. However, to fully capitalize on the possibilities, the IC manufacturing world faces particular challenges in figuring out how to get a high yield of actionable information from its streams of vari... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


KKR, an investment firm, announced that it is leading a $42 million growth equity investment in Optimal+, a provider of manufacturing intelligence software solutions for adaptive IC test applications. In case you missed it, Apple rolled out its latest iPhones and other products. The latest iPhone 6 is using chips based on finFETs, according to AnandTech, a hi-tech site. Samsung is the main... » read more

More Data, Different Approaches


Scaling, rising complexity, and integration are all contributing to an explosion in data, from initial design to physical layout to verification and into the manufacturing phase. Now the question is what to do with all of that data. For SoC designs, that data is critical for identifying real and potential problems. It also allows verification engineers working the back end of the design flow... » read more

Five Disruptive Test Technologies


For years, test has been a critical part of the IC manufacturing flow. Chipmakers, OSATs and the test houses buy the latest testers and design-for-test (DFT) software tools in the market and for good reason. A plethora of unwanted field returns is not acceptable in today’s market. The next wave of complex chips may require more test coverage and test times. That could translate into higher... » read more

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