Preparing For Test Early In The Design Flow


Until very recently, semiconductor design, verification, and test were separate domains. Those domains have since begun to merge, driven by rising demand for reliability, shorter market windows, and increasingly complex chip architectures. In the past, products were designed from a functional perspective, and designers were not concerned about what the physical implementation of the product ... » read more

Excess noise in high-current diamond diodes


Abstract "We report the results of an investigation of low-frequency excess noise in high-current diamond diodes. It was found that the electronic excess noise of the diamond diodes is dominated by the 1/f and generation-recombination noise, which reveals itself as Lorentzian spectral features (f is the frequency). The generation-recombination bulges are characteristic of diamond diodes with l... » read more

Unknowns Driving Up The Cost Of Auto IC Reliability


Automotive chipmakers are considering a variety of options to improve the reliability of ICs used for everything from sensors to artificial intelligence. But collectively they could boost the number of process steps, increase the time spent in manufacturing and packaging, and stir up concerns about the amount of data that needs to be collected, shared, and stored. Accounting for advanced pro... » read more

Inspecting And Testing GaN Power Semis


As demand for new automotive battery electric vehicles (BEVs) heats up, automakers are looking for solutions to meet strict zero-defect goals in power semiconductors. Gallium nitride (GaN) and silicon carbide (SiC) wide-bandgap power semiconductors offer automakers a range of new EV solutions, but questions remain on how to meet the stringent quality goals of the automotive industry. Among t... » read more

A Review on the Fabrication and Reliability of Three-Dimensional Integration Technologies for Microelectronic Packaging: Through-Si-via and Solder Bumping Process


Abstract "With the continuous miniaturization of electronic devices and the upcoming new technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), fifth-generation cellular networks (5G), etc., the electronics industry is achieving high-speed, high-performance, and high-density electronic packaging. Three-dimensional (3D) Si-chip stacking using through-Si-via (TSV) and sol... » read more

Research on the Humidity Resistance Reliability of Different Packaging Structures


Abstract "Packaging process is an indispensable part in the process of electronic components manufacturing, and its packaging quality directly affects the nominal power, reliability and other functions of the product in the subsequent application process. Through the research on the humidity resistance reliability of different packaging structures, C-Mount packaging structure, TO packaging str... » read more

Reliability Concerns Shift Left Into Chip Design


Demand for lower defect rates and higher yields is increasing, in part because chips are now being used for safety- and mission-critical applications, and in part because it's a way of offsetting rising design and manufacturing costs. What's changed is the new emphasis on solving these problems in the initial design. In the past, defectivity and yield were considered problems for the fab. Re... » read more

Using Manufacturing Data To Boost Reliability


As chipmakers turn to increasingly customized and complex heterogeneous designs to boost performance per watt, they also are demanding lower defectivity and higher yields to help offset the rising design and manufacturing costs. Solving those issues is a mammoth multi-vendor effort. There can be hundreds of process steps in fabs and packaging houses. And as feature sizes continue to shrink, ... » read more

Big Payback For Combining Different Types Of Fab Data


Collecting and combining diverse data types from different manufacturing processes can play a significant role in improving semiconductor yield, quality, and reliability, but making that happen requires integrating deep domain expertise from various different process steps and sifting through huge volumes of data scattered across a global supply chain. The semiconductor manufacturing IC data... » read more

End-To-End Traceability


Despite standards such as ISO 26262 and IEC 61508, there are still disconnects and gaps in the supply chain and design-through-manufacturing flows. Kurt Shuler, vice president of marketing at Arteris IP, digs into what's missing, why changes made in one area are not reflected in other areas and throughout the product lifecycle, and why various different phases of the flow don't always match up ... » read more

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