Where And When End-to-End Analytics Works


With data exploding across all manufacturing steps, the promise of leveraging it from fab to field is beginning to pay off. Engineers are beginning to connect device data across manufacturing and test steps, making it possible to more easily achieve yield and quality goals at lower cost. The key is knowing which process knob will increase yield, which failures can be detected earlier, and wh... » read more

Automotive Safety Island


The promise of autonomous vehicles is driving profound changes in the design and testing of automotive semiconductor parts. Automotive ICs, once deployed for simple functions like controlling windows, are now performing complex functions related to advanced driver-assist systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving applications. The processing power required results in very large and complex ICs that ... » read more

How AI/ML Improves Fab Operations


Chip shortages are forcing fabs and OSATs to maximize capacity and assess how much benefit AI and machine learning can provide. This is particularly important in light of the growth projections by market analysts. The chip manufacturing industry is expected to double in size over the next five years, and collective improvements in factories, AI databases, and tools will be essential for doub... » read more

Harnessing The Power Of Data In Semiconductor Test


Every day, new methods are being developed to harvest, cleanse, integrate, and analyze data sources and extract from them useful, actionable intelligence to aid decision-making and other processes. This is true for a variety of industries, including semiconductor design, manufacturing, and test. Moore’s Law (figure 1) may be slowing with respect to traditional scaling of transistor critica... » read more

Semiconductor Test In The Gate All Around Era


The past two years have witnessed unprecedented growth in the semiconductor industry, driven by advances in artificial intelligence, natural language processing, automated vehicles, and augmented and virtual reality. All of these applications depend heavily on advancements in semiconductors to meet their needs for enormous computational processing and communication bandwidth to makes sense of t... » read more

CEO Outlook: Chip Industry 2022


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss broad industry changes and how that affects chip design with Anirudh Devgan, president and CEO of Cadence; Joseph Sawicki, executive vice president of Siemens EDA; Niels Faché, vice president and general manager at Keysight; Simon Segars, advisor at Arm; and Aki Fujimura, chairman and CEO of D2S. This discussion was held in front of a live audience... » read more

The Challenges Of Incremental Verification


Verification consumes more time and resources than design, and yet little headway is being made to optimize it. The reasons are complex, and there are more questions than there are answers. For example, what is the minimum verification required to gain confidence in a design change? How can you minimize the cost of finding out that the change was bad, or that it had unintended consequences? ... » read more

4 Tips For 5G New Radio Signal Creation


5G NR requires you to think differently about how you design and test devices. Learn the four tips to help you successfully generate 5G NR test signals to get your designs to market faster. Click here to read more. » read more

Finding And Applying Domain Expertise In IC Analytics


Behind PowerPoint slides depicting the data inputs and outputs of a data analytics platform belies the complexity, effort, and expertise that improve fab yield. With the tsunami of data collected for semiconductor devices, fabs need engineers with domain expertise to effectively manage the data and to correctly learn from the data. Naively analyzing a data set can lead to an uninteresting an... » read more

Detecting Spatial Blotches In Image Sensor Devices


One of the most common defects in image sensor devices is spatial blotches. The appearance of blotches in image sensors is a regular occurrence and may be generated by internal moving parts or may be moved by air currents within the camera. Composed of two main statistical methods, the first module employs an inferential method, applying a spatial segmentation of the current frame to obtain ... » read more

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