Chip Industry Week in Review

By The SE Staff - 16 May, 2025 - Comments: 0

Check out the Inside Chips podcast for our behind-the-scenes analysis. Newly proposed U.S. legislation called the Chip Security Act would use location verification tracking as a tool to help combat chip smuggling. This follows a report by the Economist that showed Taiwan exports of advanced chips to Malaysia in the first quarter has nearly reached 2024 totals, heightening concerns that China... » read more

AI For Test: The New Frontier

By Christophe Begue - 08 May, 2025 - Comments: 0

Dr. Ming Zhang, PDF Solutions vice president of Fabless Solutions, delivered the keynote at the TestConX 2025 conference in March. As he began his presentation, Ming borrowed the “learn, explore and share” line from Ira Feldman, the organizer of the conference, to set the tone of his talk. He promised to share what he and PDF Solutions learned and what’s useful and what’s not useful as ... » read more

Identifying Sources Of Silent Data Corruption

By Laura Peters - 08 May, 2025 - Comments: 0

Silent data errors are raising concerns in large data centers, where they can propagate through systems and wreak havoc on long-duration programs like AI training runs. SDEs, also called silent data corruption, are technically rare. But with many thousands of servers, which contain millions of processors running at high utilization rates, these damaging events become common in large fleets. ... » read more

E-Beam Inspection Proves Essential For Advanced Nodes

By Gregory Haley - 08 May, 2025 - Comments: 0

Electron-beam inspection is proving to be indispensable for finding critical defects at sub-5nm dimensions. The challenge now is how to speed up the process to make it economically palatable to fabs. E-beam inspection's notorious sensitivity-throughput tradeoff has made comprehensive defect coverage with e-beam at these advanced nodes especially problematic. For Intel’s 18A logic node (~1.... » read more

Overview of Silicon Carbide Technology: Status, Challenges, Key Drivers, and Product Roadmap

By PDF Solutions - 08 May, 2025 - Comments: 0

Abstract: Arguably, SiC technology is the most rapidly expanding IC manufacturing technology driven mostly by the aggressive roadmap for battery electric vehicle penetration and also industrial high-voltage/high-power applications. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the state of the art of SiC technology focusing on the challenges starting from the difficult and lengthy SiC substr... » read more

Who Is Most Likely To Link Financial And Manufacturing Data?

By Anne Meixner - 08 May, 2025 - Comments: 0

Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss which companies have the most to gain from linking financial data with manufacturing data analytics platforms with Dieter Rathei, CEO of DR Yield; Jon Holt, senior director of product management at PDF Solutions, Alex Burlak, vice president of advanced analytics and test at proteanTecs; and Dirk de Vries, technical program ma... » read more

Need For Speed Drives Targeted Testing

By Gregory Haley - 23 Apr, 2025 - Comments: 0

As packaging complexity increases and nodes shrink, defect detection becomes significantly more difficult. Engineers must contend with subtle variations introduced during fabrication and assembly without sacrificing throughput. New material stacks degrade signal-to-noise ratios, which makes metrology more difficult. At the same time, inspection systems face a more nuanced challenge — how t... » read more

Secure Handling Of Financial Data In Manufacturing

By Anne Meixner - 21 Apr, 2025 - Comments: 0

Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the advantages associated with linking financial data with manufacturing data analytic platforms, real security challenges and the best uses for AI/ML methods, with Dieter Rathei, CEO of DR Yield; Jon Holt, senior director of product management at PDF Solutions, Alex Burlak, vice president of advanced analytics and test at p... » read more

2025-Product Design Enhancement With Test Structures For Non-Contact Detection Of Yield Detractors

By PDF Solutions - 08 Apr, 2025 - Comments: 0

Abstract: Detection and monitoring of the yield loss mechanisms and defects in product chips have been a subject of extensive efforts, resulting in multiple useful Design-for-Manufacturing (DFM) and Design-for-Test (DFT) techniques. Defect inspection techniques extend optical inspection further into sub-10 nm nodes, but many buried defects are formed as a result of multi-layer 3-D interaction... » read more

Improving Manufacturing Yields With Process Control Solutions

By Jonathan Holt - 08 Apr, 2025 - Comments: 0

Even after 20 years or so, process control continues to be a confusing or misunderstood technology. A short description of process control is an accurate one—It’s a means of controlling manufacturing equipment and reducing variability to improve yields and performance of the products manufactured through that equipment. Tools like PDF Solutions Fault Detection and Classification (FDC)... » read more

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