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

Increasing eFPGA Adoption Will Shape eFPGA Features/Benefits


eFPGA adoption is accelerating. eFPGA is now available from multiple suppliers for multiple foundries and on nodes including 180nm, 40nm, 28nm, 22nm, 16nm, 12nm and 7nm. There are double-digit chips proven in silicon by multiple customers for multiple applications. And many more in fab, in design and in planning. The three main applications are: Integration of existing FPGA chips int... » read more

IC Test Solutions For The Automotive Market


The amount of electronic content in passenger cars continues to grow rapidly, driven mainly by the integration of various advanced safety features, which will increase further with the move towards fully autonomous vehicles. It is critical that these safety-related devices adhere to the highest possible quality and reliability requirements formalized in the ISO 26262 standard that is being rapi... » read more

What’s Holding Back Aging Simulation?


Aging simulation supplies information about the long-term behavior before an IC enters into production, providing an important early evaluation of the reliability required by the application and specification. Re-designs due to reliability issues, and over-design with excessive safety margins, are avoided in this way. In addition, the long-term stability can be demonstrated to the customer. ... » read more

Accelerated Life Testing For Failure Prediction


By Theresa Duncan and Chris South Product reliability is essential for success, especially for electronic products like printed circuit boards (PCB). Accelerated life testing (ALT) is an expedient and cost-effective solution to determine the reliability and robustness of an electronic product or component. ALT uncovers potential failure risks and quantifies the life characteristics of a p... » read more

Redefining Device Failures


Can a 5nm or 3nm chip really perform to spec over a couple decades? The answer is yes, but not using traditional approaches for designing, manufacturing or testing those chips. At the next few process nodes, all the workarounds and solutions that have been developed since 45nm don't necessarily apply. In the early finFET processes, for example, the new transistor structure provided a huge im... » read more

Reliability Challenges Grow For 5/3nm


Ensuring that chips will be reliable at 5nm and 3nm is becoming more difficult due to the introduction of new materials, new transistor structures, and the projected use of these chips in safety- and mission-critical applications. Each of these elements adds its own set of challenges, but they are being compounded by the fact that many of these chips will end up in advanced packages or modul... » read more

The Need For Traceability In Auto Chips


Someday your car will drive itself to a repair shop for a recall using a scheduling application that is both efficient and can prioritize which vehicles need to be fixed first. But that's still a ways off. Proactive identification of issues is not yet available. To be ready for that, today’s data analytics systems need to begin supporting targeted recalls, enabling predictive maintenance a... » read more

Test Is Becoming A Horizontal Process


Semiconductor test, once a discrete part of a well-orchestrated series of manufacturing steps, is looking more like a process that extends from the early concept stage in design to the end of life of whatever system that chip ultimately is used for. This has important ramifications for safety-critical markets in general, and the semiconductor industry in particular. Both worlds have been inc... » read more

Grading Chips For Longer Lifetimes


Figuring out how to grade chips is becoming much more difficult as these chips are used in applications where they are supposed to last for decades rather than just a couple of years. During manufacturing, semiconductors typically are run through a battery of tests involving performance and power, and then priced accordingly. But that is no longer a straightforward process for several reason... » read more

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