The Power Of AI To Drive Productivity Gains


Tuberculosis (TB) has been around for at least 9000 years, and people have been trying to find a cure or treatment for hundreds of years, but it remains one of the deadliest infectious diseases in the world, killing more than 1.5 million people per year. Despite all of the motivation and effort, there has been only partial progress in fully eradicating the disease but a company in South Korea, ... » read more

Isolating Critical Data In Failure Analysis


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss traceability and the lack of data needed to perform root cause analysis with Frank Chen, director of applications and product management at Bruker Nano Surfaces & Metrology; Mike McIntyre, director of product management in the Enterprise Business Unit at Onto Innovation; Kamran Hakim, ASIC reliability engineer at Teradyne... » read more

Chip Industry Talent Shortage Drives Academic Partnerships


Universities around the world are forming partnerships with semiconductor companies and governments to help fill open and future positions, to keep curricula current and relevant, and to update and expand skills for working engineers. Talent shortages repeatedly have been cited as the number one challenge for the chip industry. Behind those concerns are several key drivers, and many more dom... » read more

Using Smart Data To Boost Semiconductor Reliability


The chip industry is looking to AI and data analytics to improve yield, operational efficiency, and reduce the overall cost of designing and manufacturing complex devices. In fact, SEMI estimates its members could capture more than $60B in revenues associated through smart data use and AI. Getting there, however, requires overcoming a number of persistent obstacles. Smart data utilization is... » read more

Integration Challenges For ATE Data


Tighter integration of automatic test equipment (ATE) into semiconductor manufacturing, so that data from one process can be seamlessly leveraged by another, holds significant promise to boost manufacturing efficiency and yield. The challenge is selling this concept to fabs, packaging houses, and their customers. Data involving yield parameters, process variations, and intricate details abou... » read more

Streamlining Failure Analysis Of Chips


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss how increasing complexity in semiconductor and packaging technology is driving shifts in failure analysis methods, with Frank Chen, director of applications and product management at Bruker Nano Surfaces & Metrology; Mike McIntyre, director of product management in the Enterprise Business Unit at Onto Innovation; Kamran Hak... » read more

Delivering Real-Time Analytics To Semiconductor Test


As defined by Moore’s Law, the semiconductor field has been growing at a steady pace since the 1960s. Concurrent with this progression, semiconductors are becoming more complex, densely integrated, and expensive to produce. While such advancements pose new challenges to semiconductor manufacturing, we can extend Moore’s Law well into the future by reimagining the way we approach the semicon... » read more

Fab And Field Data Transforming Manufacturing Processes


The ability to capture, process, and analyze data in the field is transforming semiconductor metrology and testing, providing invaluable insight into a product's performance in real-time and under real-world conditions and use cases. Historically, data that encapsulates parameters such as power consumption, temperature, voltages, currents, timing, and other characteristics, was confined to d... » read more

Customizing IC Test To Improve Yield And Reliability


Testing the performance and power of semiconductors as they come off the production line is beginning to shift left in the fab, reversing a long-standing trend of assessing chips just prior to shipping. While this may sound straightforward, it's a difficult challenge which, if successful, will have broad implications for the entire design-through-manufacturing flow. Manufacturers typically g... » read more

Test Strategies In The Era Of Heterogeneous Integration


Moore’s Law, the observation that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years, is critical to advances in computing technology. For decades, fabs have managed to achieve exponential growth in digital capability and transistor density by making transistors smaller and smaller, but we’ve hit the physical limits of these processes. Today, new proces... » read more

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