Chip Industry Week In Review


Analog Devices acquired Flex Logix's technology assets, along with its technical team. Semiconductor global sales increased 23% in Q3 2024 $166B, up almost 11% versus the same period in 2023, according to SIA. Notable regional year-to-year sales in September: Americas up 46%, China up 23%, Europe down 8%. Fig.1: Worldwide Semiconductor Revenues, year-to-year % change. Source: Semiconduc... » read more

AI’s Power To Transform Semiconductor Design And Manufacturing


Artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) have immense power to transform semiconductor design and manufacturing for a variety of broad and far-ranging applications. Just consider the volume of data generated by design and manufacturing each year. With increasingly complex products, machines, processes and supply chains, the overall amount of data associated with semiconductor making... » read more

Metrology Advances Step Up To Sub-2nm Device Node Needs


Metrology and inspection are dealing with a slew of issues tied to 3D measurements, buried defects, and higher sensitivity as device features continue to shrink to 2nm and below. This is made even more challenging due to increasing pressure to ramp new processes more quickly. Metrology tool suppliers must exceed current needs by a process node or two to ensure solutions are ready to meet tig... » read more

Using AI To Glue Disparate IC Ecosystem Data


AI holds the potential to change how companies interact throughout the global semiconductor ecosystem, gluing together different data types and processes that can be shared between companies that in the past had little or no direct connections. Chipmakers always have used abstraction layers to see the bigger picture of how the various components of a chip go together, allowing them to pinpoi... » read more

Defect Challenges Grow At The Wafer Edge


Reducing defects on the wafer edge, bevel, and backside is becoming essential as the complexity of developing leading-edge chips continue to increase, and where a single flaw can have costly repercussions that span multiple processes and multi-chip packages. This is made more difficult by the widespread rollout of such processes as hybrid bonding, which require pristine surfaces, and the gro... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


The Biden-Harris Administration announced preliminary terms with HP for $50 million in direct funding under the CHIPs and Science Act to support the expansion and modernization of HP’s existing microfluidics and microelectromechanical systems (“MEMS”) facility in Corvallis, Oregon. CHIPS for America launched the CHIPS Metrology Community, a collaborative initiative designed to advance ... » read more

Blog Review: Aug. 28


Synopsys' Jon Ames checks out how the Ultra Ethernet Consortium aims to revolutionize networking by optimizing Ethernet for the rapidly evolving AI and HPC workloads by addressing critical issues like tail latency that are encountered by machine learning algorithms in large compute clusters. Cadence's Kos Gitchev introduces the DDR5 Multiplexed Rank DIMM (MRDIMM), a memory module technology ... » read more

AI/ML’s Role In Design And Test Expands


The role of AI and ML in test keeps growing, providing significant time and money savings that often exceed initial expectations. But it doesn't work in all cases, sometimes even disrupting well-tested process flows with questionable return on investment. One of the big attractions of AI is its ability to apply analytics to large data sets that are otherwise limited by human capabilities. In... » read more

Metrology And Inspection For The Chiplet Era


New developments and innovations in metrology and inspection will enable chipmakers to identify and address defects faster and with greater accuracy than ever before, all of which will be required at future process nodes and in densely packed assemblies of chiplets. These advances will affect both front-end and back-end processes, providing increased precision and efficiency, combined with a... » read more

Expediting Manufacturing Safe Launch With Big Data AI/ML Analytic Solutions On The Cloud


With highly competitive time-to-market and time-to-volume windows, IC suppliers need to be able to release new product to production (NPI) in a timely manner with competitive manufacturing metrics. Manufacturing yield, test time and quality are important metrics in NPI to Manufacturing safe launch. A powerful yield management system is crucial to achieve the goal metrics. In this paper, recomme... » read more

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