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

Lessons In Monitoring System Performance


At proteanTecs, we set out to revolutionize electronics with a breakthrough approach to address the challenges that come with scale: Deep Data monitoring of the health & performance of systems, from design to field. Knowledge and education are profoundly rooted in our core values. However, as the circumstances of COVID-19 unfold, we are following the guidelines of the World Health Organi... » read more

Degradation Monitoring


This paper describes a reliability degradation modeling and monitoring method based on a combination of IC novel embedded circuits (Agents), and off-chip machine learning algorithms which infer the digital readouts of these circuits during test and operational lifetime. Together, they monitor the margin degradation of an IC, as well as other vital parameters of the IC and its environmental s... » read more

Blog Review: Feb. 12


Complexity is growing by process node, by end application, and in each design. The latest crop of blogs points to just how many dependencies and uncertainties exist today, and what the entire supply chain is doing about them. Mentor's Shivani Joshi digs into various types of constraints in PCBs. Cadence's Neelabh Singh examines the complexities of verifying a lane adapter state machine in... » read more

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