RMAs: Root Problem Found


For decades, costs of production and maintenance have been driven down through manufacturing, process and logistical innovation, creating more breathing room for margin to maintain viable growth. There are other costs, however, that we seemingly accept as inevitable and simply get better at factoring in as par-for-the-course, or ‘eggs broken’ to make the omelet. The ubiquitous presence of ... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Fast Arm-based supercomputer Japan has taken the lead in the supercomputer race, jumping ahead of the U.S. But China continues to make its presence felt in the arena. Fugaku, an ARM-based supercomputer jointly developed by Japan’s Riken and Fujitsu, is now ranked the world’s fastest supercomputer in the 55th TOP500 list. Fugaku turned in a high performance Linpack (HPL) result of 415.5... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Security The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) selected Synopsys as the main contractor to provide SoC design tools and security IP for its Automatic Implementation of Secure Silicon (AISS) program. The four-year program’s goal to develop a design tool and IP ecosystem to automate adding security into integrated circuits. Synopsys will be working on a research team with ... » read more

How To Improve DPPM By 10X Without Affecting Yield


Chips today are under immense pressure. With wider process variation manifested at wafer and die levels in single-digit nodes, highly complex designs, and effects of application and system integration, it’s no wonder the electronics value chain is becoming ever more reliant on expensive guard-bands. The ecosystem is not yet equipped to find all existing defects during test. So while quality e... » read more

Making Silicon Photonics Chips More Reliable


Silicon photonics has the ability to dramatically improve on-die and chip-to-chip communication within a package at extremely low power, but ensuring that signal integrity remains consistent over time isn't so simple. While this technology has been used commercially for at least the past decade, it never has achieved mainstream status. That's mostly due to the fact that Moore's Law scaling h... » read more

Ensuring HBM Reliability


Igor Elkanovich, CTO of GUC, and Evelyn Landman, CTO of proteanTecs, talk with Semiconductor Engineering about difficulties that crop up in advanced packaging, what’s redundant and what is not when using high-bandwidth memory, and how continuous in-circuit monitoring can identify potential problems before they happen. » read more

BiST Vs. In-Circuit Sensors


Monitoring the health of a chip post-manufacturing, including how it is aging and performing over time, is becoming much more important as ICs make their way into safety-critical applications such as the central brain in automobiles. Faced with longer lifespans and a growing body of functional safety rules, systems vendors need to be able to predict when a part will fail. But as sensing auto... » read more

New Uses For Manufacturing Data


The semiconductor industry is becoming more reliant on data analytics to ensure that a chip will work as expected over its projected lifetime, but that data is frequently inconsistent or incomplete, and some of the most useful data is being hoarded by companies for competitive reasons. The volume of data is rising at each new process node, where there are simply more things to keep track of,... » read more

Sensing Automotive IC Failures


The sooner you detect a failure in any electronic system, the sooner you can act. Together, data analytics and on-chip sensors are poised to boost quality in auto chips and add a growing level of predictive maintenance for vehicles. The ballooning number of chips cars makes it difficult to reach 10 defective parts per billion for every IC that goes into a car.  And requiring that for a 15-y... » read more

Reliability Monitoring Of GUC 7nm High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) Subsystem


This white paper presents the use of proteanTecs’ Proteus for HBM subsystem reliability based on deep data analytics and enhanced visibility, overcoming the limitations of advanced heterogeneous packaging. It will describe the operation concept and provide results from a GUC 7nm HBM Controller ASIC. A typical CoWoS chip has hundreds of thousands of micro-bumps (u-bumps). 3-8 u-bumps are us... » read more

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