Circuit Aging Becoming A Critical Consideration


Circuit aging was considered somebody else's problem when most designs were for chips in consumer applications, but not anymore. Much of this reflects a shift in markets. When most chips were designed for consumer electronics, such as smart phones, designs typically were replaced every couple of years. But with the mobile phone market flattening, and as chips increasingly are used in automot... » read more

BiST Grows Up In Automotive


Test concepts and methods that have been used for many years in traditional semiconductor and SoC design are now being leveraged for automotive chips, but they need to be adapted and upgraded to enable monitoring of advanced automotive systems during operation of a vehicle. Automotive and safety critical designs have very high quality, reliability, and safety requirements, which pairs pe... » read more

Test Moving Forward And Backward


Test, once considered an important but rather mundane way of separating good chips from the not-so-good and the total rejects, is taking on a whole new life. After decades of largely living in the shadows behind design and advancements in materials and lithography, test has quietly shifted into a much more critical and more public role. But it has taken several rather significant shifts acro... » read more

Analog Fault Simulation


Anand Thiruvengadam, senior staff product marketing manager at Synopsys, drills down into the need for fault simulation in analog circuits in automotive designs. » read more

In-Chip Monitoring Becoming Essential Below 10nm


Rising systemic complexity and more potential interactions in heterogeneous designs is making it much more difficult to ensure a chip, or even a block within a chip, will functioning properly without actually monitoring that behavior in real-time. Continuous and sporadic monitoring have been creeping into designs for the past couple of decades. But it hasn’t always been clear how effective... » read more

Hidden Soldier Joints Inspection: 4 Case Studies


IC packaging technologies are becoming smaller and thinner. Ball grid array (BGA) packages were introduced some years ago in order to save space on the PCB, and are now widely used. To overcome the resulting problems with using optical microscopy as an inspection tool, the endoscope found its way into quality engineering departments. To read more, click here. » read more

Gaps Emerge In Automotive Test


Demands by automakers for zero defects over 18 years are colliding with real-world limitations of testing complex circuitry and interactions, and they are exposing a fundamental disconnect between mechanical and electronic expectations that could be very expensive to fix. This is especially apparent at leading-edge nodes, where much of the logic is being developed for AI systems and image se... » read more

Making AI More Dependable


Ira Leventhal, vice president of Advantest’s new concept product initiative, looks at why AI has taken so long to get going, what role it will play in improving the reliability of all chips, and how to use AI to improve the reliability of AI chips themselves. » read more

Automotive System Design


Burkhard Huhnke, vice president of automotive at Synopsys, looks at how to build and update chips in increasingly sophisticated vehicles, where the problem spots are, and what comes next. » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


ANSYS acquired the assets of DfR Solutions, a developer of automated design reliability analysis software. Founded in 2004 and based in Maryland, DfR's tool translates ECAD and MCAE data into 3D finite element models, automates thermal derating and performs thermal and mechanical analysis of electronics earlier in the design cycle. "ANSYS brings industry-leading electronic simulation capabiliti... » read more

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