Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers Taiwan’s Foxconn continues to expand its efforts in the semiconductor business. Foxconn has acquired a 6-inch wafer fab and the equipment from Taiwan’s Macronix for NT$2.52 billion (US$90.76 million). With the fab, Foxconn plans to enter the wideband gap semiconductor market, namely silicon carbide (SiC). SiC devices are used in electric vehicles, a market that Foxconn is making... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers Intel has outlined its new process technology roadmap with plans to regain the leadership position in the market. As part of the move, Intel has changed the way it designates the nodes, revealed its new gate-all-around (GAA) transistor, and disclosed a customer for the GAA technology--Qualcomm. And not to be outdone, Intel has broadened its packaging portfolio. Intel is changing ... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers and OEMs The industry is still wondering if Intel will buy GlobalFoundries (GF). In the meantime, GF has announced a fab expansion plan in upstate New York. These plans include immediate investments at its existing Fab 8 facility as well as construction of a new fab on the same campus. That will double the capacity at the site. Intel has reported its second-quarter 2021 financial... » read more

Innovative Dual Mark Design For Alignment Verification And Process Monitoring In Advanced Lithography


Improving on product overlay is one of the key challenges when shrinking technology nodes in semiconductor manufacturing. . . . With smart placement of alignment mark pairs in the X and Y direction, it is possible to determine intra-wafer distortion wafer-by-wafer. Both the measurement and modeled results are applied directly as a feed-forward correction to enable wafer level control. In this p... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers The chip industry is buzzing over a Wall Street Journal report that Intel is in talks to buy GlobalFoundries (GF) for $30 billion. In March, Intel re-entered the foundry business, positioning itself against Samsung and TSMC at the leading edge, and against a multitude of foundries working at older nodes. Intel planned to jumpstart its foundry business within its own fabs. But it... » read more

Reliability Costs Becoming Harder To Track


Ensuring reliability in chips is becoming more complex and significantly more expensive, shifting left into the design cycle and right into the field. But those costs also are becoming more difficult to define and track, varying greatly from one design to the next based upon process node, package technology, market segment, and which fab or OSAT is used. As the number of options increases fo... » read more

What’s Next In Fab Tool Technologies?


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography and other next-generation fab technologies with Jerry Chen, head of global business development for manufacturing & industrials at Nvidia; David Fried, vice president of computational products at Lam Research; Mark Shirey, vice president of marketing and applications at KLA; and Aki Fuj... » read more

Applications, Challenges For Using AI In Fabs


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss chip scaling, transistors, new architectures, and packaging with Jerry Chen, head of global business development for manufacturing & industrials at Nvidia; David Fried, vice president of computational products at Lam Research; Mark Shirey, vice president of marketing and applications at KLA; and Aki Fujimura, CEO of D2S. Wh... » read more

National Security And Artificial Intelligence


The (U.S.) National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence recently published its final report. The report is 756 pages long, so I am not going to claim that I've read it all. I read the introduction and some of the conclusion, and the chapter on microelectronics (basically, semiconductors and advanced packaging). To give you a flavor, here are the opening paragraphs of the "Letter f... » read more

AI In Inspection, Metrology, And Test


AI/ML is creeping into multiple processes within the fab and packaging houses, although not necessarily for the purpose it was originally intended. The chip industry is just beginning to learn where AI makes sense and where it doesn't. In general, AI works best as a tool in the hands of someone with deep domain expertise. AI can do certain things well, particularly when it comes to pattern m... » read more

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