Looking Inside Of Chips


Shai Cohen, co-founder and CEO of proteanTecs, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about how to boost reliability and add resiliency into chips and advanced packaging. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: Several years ago, no one was thinking about on-chip monitoring. What's changed? Cohen: Today it is obvious that a solution is needed for optimizing performanc... » read more

Week In Review: Semiconductor Manufacturing, Test


SEMI , SEMI Europe and European Commission representatives, in consultation with semiconductor industry stakeholders, proposed initiatives to overcome the skills shortage in Europe’s microelectronics industry: Create an industry image campaign to raise public awareness on how technology is shaping the future, and how workers can establish careers in the semiconductor industry. Remove ... » read more

Variability Becoming More Problematic, More Diverse


Process variability is becoming more problematic as transistor density increases, both in planar chips and in heterogeneous advanced packages. On the basis of sheer numbers, there are many more things that can wrong. “If you have a chip with 50 billion transistors, then there are 50 places where a one-in-a-billion event can happen,” said Rob Aitken, a Synopsys fellow. And if Intel’s... » read more

Improving Concurrent Chip Design, Manufacturing, And Test Flows


Semiconductor design, manufacturing, and test are becoming much more tightly integrated as the chip industry seeks to optimize designs using fewer engineers, setting the stage for greater efficiencies and potentially lower chip costs without just relying on economies of scale. The glue between these various processes is data, and the chip industry is working to weave together various steps t... » read more

Next Steps For Improving Yield


Chipmakers are ramping new tools and methodologies to achieve sufficient yield faster, despite smaller device dimensions, a growing number of systematic defects, immense data volumes, and massive competitive pressure. Whether a 3nm process is ramping, or a 28nm process is being tuned, the focus is on reducing defectivity. The challenge is to rapidly identify indicators that can improve yield... » read more

Week In Review: Semiconductor Manufacturing, Test


The United States imposed further export controls aimed at preventing foreign firms from selling advanced chips to China or supplying Chinese firms with semiconductor processing tools. Under new regulations, companies looking to supply Chinese chipmakers with advanced manufacturing equipment (<14nm) must first obtain a license from the U.S. Department of Commerce. Officials noted that they h... » read more

Why Silent Data Errors Are So Hard To Find


Cloud service providers have traced the source of silent data errors to defects in CPUs — as many as 1,000 parts per million — which produce faulty results only occasionally and under certain micro-architectural conditions. That makes them extremely hard to find. Silent data errors (SDEs) are random defects produced in manufacturing, not a design bug or software error. Those defects gene... » read more

GUC GLink Test Chip Uses In-Chip Monitoring And Deep Data Analytics For High Bandwidth Die-To-Die Characterization


Advanced ASIC leader Global Unichip Corp (GUC) has developed GLink, a high-bandwidth, low-latency, and power-efficient die-to-die (D2D) interface. GLink offers the industry’s highest optimized interconnect solution for both CoWoS and InFO packaging technologies. The GUC and proteanTecs collaboration started with GUC’s second generation of GLink, known as GLink 2.0. The project target was... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


On Sunday, a 6.8-magnitude earthquake struck the southeast region of Taiwan, causing devastation. TSMC officials reported “no known significant impact for now.” Market research firm TrendForce arrived at a similar conclusion based on its analysis of individual fabs. The Biden administration announced appointment of the leadership team charged with implementing the US CHIPS and Science Ac... » read more

Making The Most Of Data Lakes


Having all the semiconductor data available is increasingly necessary for improving manufacturability, yield, and ultimately the reliability of end devices. But without sufficient knowledge of relationships between data from different processes and computationally efficient data structures, the value of any data is significantly reduced. In the semiconductor industry, reducing waste, decreas... » read more

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