tag: quality

Rebalancing Test And Yield In IC Manufacturing
By Gregory Haley - 07 Nov, 2023 - Comments: 0

Balancing yield and test is essential to semiconductor manufacturing, but it's becoming harder to determine how much weight to give one versus the other as chips become more specialized for different applications. Yield focuses on maximizing the number of functional chips from a production batch, while test aims to ensure that each chip meets rigorous quality and performance standards. And w... » read more

Smart Manufacturing Makes Gains In Chip Industry
By Anne Meixner - 15 Jun, 2023 - Comments: 0

Lights out manufacturing is gaining steam across the semiconductor industry, accelerating productivity, improving quality, and reducing costs and environment impact. These benefits are the result of years of strategic investments in technologies like machine-to-machine communication, data analytics, and robotics to achieve higher levels of autonomy. Semiconductor factories have long depen... » read more

Challenges Grow For Creating Smaller Bumps For Flip Chips
By Anne Meixner - 18 May, 2023 - Comments: 0

New bump structures are being developed to enable higher interconnect densities in flip-chip packaging, but they are complex, expensive, and increasingly difficult to manufacture. For products with high pin counts, flip-chip [1] packages have long been a popular choice because they utilize the whole die area for interconnect. The technology has been in use since the 1970s, starting with IBM�... » read more

What Data Center Chipmakers Can Learn From Automotive
By Anne Meixner - 11 Apr, 2023 - Comments: 2

Automotive OEMs are demanding their semiconductor suppliers achieve a nearly unmeasurable target of 10 defective parts per billion (DPPB). Whether this is realistic remains to be seen, but systems companies are looking to emulate that level of quality for their data center SoCs. Building to that quality level is more expensive up front, although ultimately it can save costs versus having to ... » read more

Silent Data Corruption
By Ed Sperling - 12 Dec, 2022 - Comments: 0

Defects can creep into chip manufacturing from anywhere, but the problem is getting worse at advanced nodes and in advanced packages where reduced pin access can make testing much more difficult. Ira Leventhal, vice president of U.S. Applied Research and Technology at Advantest America, talks about what’s causing these so-called silent data errors, how to find them, and why it now requires ma... » read more

Automated Optical Inspection
By Ed Sperling - 07 Nov, 2022 - Comments: 0

Building good automated models for inspection require more data to be collected, both good and bad. Vijay Thangamariappan, R&D engineer at Advantest, explains how to develop models for automating optical inspection, using a multi-thousand pin socket as an example for how machine learning has helped reduce the return rate due to defects from 2% down to zero. He also explains how to achieve t... » read more

The Race To Zero Defects In Auto ICs
By Anne Meixner - 07 Jun, 2022 - Comments: 0

Assembly houses are fine-tuning their methodologies and processes for automotive ICs, optimizing everything from inspection and metrology to data management in order to prevent escapes and reduce the number of costly returns. Today, assembly defects account for between 12% and 15% of semiconductor customer returns in the automotive chip market. As component counts in vehicles climb from the ... » read more

Where And When End-to-End Analytics Works
By Anne Meixner - 10 May, 2022 - Comments: 0

With data exploding across all manufacturing steps, the promise of leveraging it from fab to field is beginning to pay off. Engineers are beginning to connect device data across manufacturing and test steps, making it possible to more easily achieve yield and quality goals at lower cost. The key is knowing which process knob will increase yield, which failures can be detected earlier, and wh... » read more

Finding And Applying Domain Expertise In IC Analytics
By Anne Meixner - 12 Apr, 2022 - Comments: 0

Behind PowerPoint slides depicting the data inputs and outputs of a data analytics platform belies the complexity, effort, and expertise that improve fab yield. With the tsunami of data collected for semiconductor devices, fabs need engineers with domain expertise to effectively manage the data and to correctly learn from the data. Naively analyzing a data set can lead to an uninteresting an... » read more

Auto Chipmakers Dig Down To 10ppb
By Anne Meixner - 08 Mar, 2022 - Comments: 0

How do engineers deliver 10 defective parts per billion (Dppb) to auto makers if they only screen 1 million parts per year? Answer: By comprehending failure mechanisms and proactively screening for them. Modern automobiles contain nearly 1,000 ICs that must perform over the vehicle’s life (15 years). This drives quality expectations ever higher. While 10 Dppm used to be a solid benchmark, ... » read more

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