Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Photonic Chips Go Big In Europe PhotonDelta, a collaborative end-to-end supply chain for the application of photonics chips, secured €1.1 billion in conditional funding for a six-year initiative. Investments from the Netherlands government and other organizations “will be used to build 200 startups, scale up production, create new applications for photonic chips, and develop infrastructure... » read more

Finding And Applying Domain Expertise In IC Analytics


Behind PowerPoint slides depicting the data inputs and outputs of a data analytics platform belies the complexity, effort, and expertise that improve fab yield. With the tsunami of data collected for semiconductor devices, fabs need engineers with domain expertise to effectively manage the data and to correctly learn from the data. Naively analyzing a data set can lead to an uninteresting an... » read more

Fundamental Shifts In IC Manufacturing Processes


High chip value and 3D packaging are changing where and how tests are performed, tightening design-for-reliability and accelerating the shift of tools from lab to fab. Heterogeneous integration and more domain-specific designs are causing a string of disruptions for chip manufacturers, up-ending proven fab processes and methodologies, extending the time it takes to manufacture a chip, and ul... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers and OEMs Apple has rolled out its most powerful processor, dubbed the M1 Ultra, a multi-die chip that incorporates the company's new packaging technology. The M1 Ultra is incorporated in Apple’s new Mac Studio desktop. M1 Ultra features a 20-core CPU, a 64-core GPU, and a 32-core Neural Engine. The M1 Ultra also features UltraFusion, Apple’s new packaging architecture. M1 Ult... » read more

Auto Chipmakers Dig Down To 10ppb


How do engineers deliver 10 defective parts per billion (Dppb) to auto makers if they only screen 1 million parts per year? Answer: By comprehending failure mechanisms and proactively screening for them. Modern automobiles contain nearly 1,000 ICs that must perform over the vehicle’s life (15 years). This drives quality expectations ever higher. While 10 Dppm used to be a solid benchmark, ... » read more

Advanced High Throughput e-Beam Inspection With DirectScan


Optical inspection cannot resolve critical defects at advanced nodes and cannot detect subsurface defects. Especially at 7nm and below, many yield and reliability killer defects are the result of interactions between lithography, etch, and fill. These defects often will have part per billion (PPB) level fail rates. Conventional eBeam tools lack the throughput to measure PPB level fail rates. A ... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Automotive Renesas and AVL Software and Functions are collaborating to support developers of automotive ISO 26262-compliant electronic control units (ECUs). Renesas sells automotive R-Car SoCs, RH850 automotive control MCUs, PMICs, and software for levels ASIL B to ASIL D of ISO26262, but even with automotive ISO26262 parts, ECU system development process is never plug and play. Functional saf... » read more

Unknowns Driving Up The Cost Of Auto IC Reliability


Automotive chipmakers are considering a variety of options to improve the reliability of ICs used for everything from sensors to artificial intelligence. But collectively they could boost the number of process steps, increase the time spent in manufacturing and packaging, and stir up concerns about the amount of data that needs to be collected, shared, and stored. Accounting for advanced pro... » read more

Preventing Failures Before They Occur


A decade or so ago, when MEMS sensors were in the limelight, one of the touted applications was to install them on industrial or other equipment to get an advance warning if the equipment was approaching failure. Today, in-circuit monitoring brings the same promise. Are these competing technologies? Or can they be made to work together? “Almost all advanced tool manufacturing companies ... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Intel intends to take Mobileye public in mid-2022 on a US market through an IPO of newly issued stock. The subsidiary, which Intel acquired in 2017, develops SoCs for ADAS and autonomous driving solutions. Mobileye has achieved record revenue year-over-year with 2021 gains expected to be more than 40 percent higher than 2020, highlighting the powerful benefits to both companies of our ongoing p... » read more

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