The fab is almost always better off financially if it can find and fix the defect inline instead of at the end of line.
Defect inspection tools can be expensive. But regardless of the cost of the inspection tool needed to find a defect, the fab is almost always better off financially if it can find and fix that defect inline versus at the end of line (e.g., electrical test and failure analysis). Here, we are referring to the term defect in a general sense—the same concepts also apply to metrology measurements.
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Rising costs and gaps in equipment emerge as technology scales; new tools under development.
Explosion of data is forcing significant changes in where processing is done.
Experts at the Table, part 1: Shrinking features isn’t enough anymore. The big challenge now is how to achieve economies of scale and minimize complex integration issues.
New market opportunities and global competitiveness are limited by qualified people.
Researchers digging into ways around the von Neumann bottleneck.
The promise of advanced packaging is being able to integrate heterogeneous chips, but a lot of work is needed to make that happen.
Better algorithms and more data could bolster adoption, particularly at advanced nodes.
30 facilities planned, including 10/7nm processes, but trade war and economic factors could slow progress.
New architectures, packaging approaches gain ground as costs increase, but shrinking features continues to play a role.
Improvement still needed for uptime, defectivity, line edge roughness and process flows.
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