More Data, More Problems In Automotive


The race toward increasing levels of autonomy is being hampered by competitive concerns over sharing data across the automotive supply chain. Pushing past the initial ADAS levels into full autonomy is expected to take more than a decade, but the infrastructure for those systems, and making sure all assisted and autonomous vehicles work with other vehicles, is under development today. Still, ... » read more

Failure Analysis Becoming Critical To Reliability


Failure analysis is rapidly becoming a complex, costly and increasingly time-consuming must-do task as demand rises for reliability across a growing range of devices used in markets ranging from automotive to 5G. From the beginning, failure analysis has been about finding out what went wrong in semiconductor design and manufacturing. Different approaches, tools and equipment have improved ov... » read more

Hardware Attack Surface Widening


An expanding attack surface in hardware, coupled with increasing complexity inside and outside of chips, is making it far more difficult to secure systems against a variety of new and existing types of attacks. Security experts have been warning about the growing threat for some time, but it is being made worse by the need to gather data from more places and to process it with AI/ML/DL. So e... » read more

Making 3D Structures And Packages More Reliable


The move to smaller vertical structures and complex packaging schemes is straining existing testing approaches, particularly in heterogeneous combinations on a single chip and in multi-die packages. The complexity of these devices has exploded with the slowdown in scaling, as chipmakers turn to architectural solutions and new transistor structures rather than just relying on shrinking featur... » read more

Automakers Changing Tactics On Reliability


Automakers are beginning to rethink how to ensure automotive electronics will remain reliable over their projected lifetimes, focusing their efforts on redundancy, more data-centric architectures and continued testing throughout the life of a vehicle. It is still too early to really know how automotive chips actually will perform over the next 15 to 20 years, especially AI logic developed at... » read more

Gaps Emerge In Test And Analytics


Sensor and process drift, increased design complexity, and continued optimization of circuitry throughout its lifetime are driving test and analytics in new directions, requiring a series of base comparisons against which equipment and processes can be measured. In the design world this type of platform is called a digital twin, but in the test world there is no equivalent today. And as more... » read more

Testing In Context Gaining Ground


Testing in context is beginning to gain wider appeal as chip complexity increases, and as ICs are deployed in more safety-critical and mission-critical applications. While design in context has been the norm for SoCs for some time, a similar approach in test has been slow going. Cell-aware testing technology was first described a decade ago, and since then its adoption has been modest. But w... » read more

Using Machine Learning To Break Down Silos


Jeff David, vice president of AI solutions at PDF Solutions, talks with Semiconductor Engineering about where machine learning can be applied into semiconductor manufacturing, how it can be used to break down silos around different process steps, how active learning works with human input to tune algorithms, and why it’s important to be able to choose different different algorithms for differ... » read more

Different Ways To Improve Chip Reliability


A push toward greater reliability in safety- and mission-critical applications is prompting some innovative approaches in semiconductor design, manufacturing, and post-production analysis of chip behavior. While quality over time has come under intensive scrutiny in automotive, where German carmakers require chips to last 18 years with zero defects, it isn't the only market demanding extende... » read more

Leveraging Data In Chipmaking


John Kibarian, president and CEO of PDF Solutions, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about the impact of data analytics on everything from yield and reliability to the inner structure of organizations, how the cloud and edge will work together, and where the big threats are in the future. SE: When did you recognize that data would be so critical to hardware design and manufact... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →