SiC Growth For EVs Is Stressing Manufacturing


The electrification of vehicles is fueling demand for silicon carbide power ICs, but it also is creating challenges in finding and identifying defects in those chips. Coinciding with this is a growing awareness about just how immature SiC technology is and how much work still needs to be done — and how quickly that has to happen. Automakers are pushing heavily into electric vehicles, and t... » read more

Intelligent Traceability For ISO 26262


Requirements driven development is a foundational component of any safety critical lifecycle, including ISO 26262, the state-of-the-art standard guiding safety in the development of automotive electronic devices. At face value, requirements seem like a very straight forward concept. Project teams write requirements. Requirements are implemented into the product. The product is tested... » read more

Metrology Sampling Plans Are Key For Device Analytics And Traceability


A mother steps on the brakes, bringing her car to a stop as she drops her kids off for dance lessons. At the time, she doesn't notice anything wrong, but when she takes her car in for its regular service appointment, the mechanic conducts a diagnostic check and discovers that the primary brake system on the car had failed because of a faulty braking controller without anyone realizing it. Fortu... » read more

Cybord: Electronic Component Traceability


Counterfeit electronics is a multibillion-dollar industry worldwide. The challenge is finding them, and this is where Israeli startup Cybord is working to gain a foothold. The company has developed an AI-driven solution that checks for counterfeit parts during product assembly. “It's a huge task to check electronic components, said Cybord CEO Zeev Efrat. "It's not capacitors only, or resis... » read more

Finding Frameworks For End-To-End Analytics


End-to-end analytics can improve yield and ROI on tool purchases, but reaping those benefits will require common data formats, die traceability, an appropriate level of data granularity — and a determination of who owns what data. New standards, guidelines, and consortium efforts are being developed to remove these barriers to data sharing for analytics purposes. But the amount of work req... » read more

Traceability Is Not My Problem (Is It?)


What is all the fuss about traceability? If it is that important, should it be handled by a compliance group? Delegating to a separate team would be the preference for most design and verification team members, but it is not possible in this case. Traceability stops short of a big brother organization constantly looking over the shoulders of the development team. The more reasonable approach is... » read more

The Race To Zero Defects In Auto ICs


Assembly houses are fine-tuning their methodologies and processes for automotive ICs, optimizing everything from inspection and metrology to data management in order to prevent escapes and reduce the number of costly returns. Today, assembly defects account for between 12% and 15% of semiconductor customer returns in the automotive chip market. As component counts in vehicles climb from the ... » read more

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

Why Traceability Matters


More heterogeneous and increasingly dense chip designs make it much harder to stay on track with initial specifications. Paul Graykowski, senior technical marketing manager at Arteris IP, talks about matching requirements to the design, the impact of ECOs and other last-minute changes, and best practices for managing revisions. » read more

Extreme Ancestry: Silicon Edition


The ability to trace the genealogy of all the components in an electronic device has been getting more complex for decades. For many industries — automotive, defense, medical and others — the need to locate the source of a problem in near real-time is paramount to gauging the extent of that problem. The extreme case is when the issue occurs with a product that already has been distributed a... » read more

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