Will Your Chip’s Memory Work As Expected?


Increased density at advanced nodes, multi-die assemblies, and the rollout of AI everywhere are making it much more challenging to ensure that memory will function properly over its expected lifetime. Test is no longer about a single memory or one approach for testing memory. It can vary by application, by workload, and by architecture. Some testing is close to memory, some is built into memory... » read more

Moving Defect Detection And Classification To The Edge


The number of defects detected through inspection is exploding at each new process node. There are now millions of defects being identified on each wafer, but only a fraction of those can cause problems. Prasad Bachiraju, senior director of business development at Onto Innovation, talks about the different types of images being captured using different illumination modes at different touch poin... » read more

System-in-Package Challenges


Systems companies and leading-edge chipmakers are pushing past reticle limits with chiplet-based designs, often breaking compute-intensive functions into different chiplets and coupling those with other chiplets that may have been developed by different teams and at different process nodes. This is harder than it sounds, and results can vary widely even under the best circumstances. Nir Sever, ... » read more

Improving Yield Through Shared Data


Increasing complexity due to advanced packaging, multi-die assemblies, and more devices under test is having an impact on yield, which in turn slows time to market and impacts overall chip costs. What's needed is a way to share data that previously was siloed by chipmakers, fabs, and OSATs. Jayant D'Souza, technical product director at Siemens EDA, talks about the underlying drivers for sharing... » read more

DFT Shifts Further Left


Design for test is now an essential part of all advanced-node designs, but DFT dynamics are changing with the move to multi-die assemblies. More components, including chiplets, make it imperative to analyze more data earlier. Jeff Meyer, product manager for Tessent logic test at Siemens EDA, talks about how to reduce the cost of this analysis and the time it takes to do it, how much can be shif... » read more

Improving IC System Quality And Performance


Ensuring that multi-die assemblies and advanced SoCs will work as expected from time zero to the end of their lifecycle adds new challenges for chipmakers and their customers. Chips are being run harder, hotter, and for longer periods of time, often in unique configurations and with customized workloads. Alex Burlak, vice president of test and analytics at proteanTecs, talks about how to identi... » read more

In-System Test For AI Data Centers


Testing inside the fab or packaging house can determine whether a chip or package meets all the functional requirements at time zero, but how that chip behaves in the field during its lifetime and under different workloads and environmental conditions may be very different. This is particularly true in AI data centers, where utilization of one or more dies may be significantly higher than in pr... » read more

Silicon Lifecycle Management


How chips are used is changing, and so are the requirements. In the past, markets were largely segmented by application, which determined how chips were designed. High-performance processors went into notebook computers, low-power chipsets were deployed in mobile devices, and complex SoCs and advanced packages were used in data centers. But with the spread of AI everywhere, traditional segmenta... » read more

Challenges In Stacking HBM


AI data centers are pushing for higher density in high-bandwidth memory. Today, the maximum number of layers that can be stacked is 8, but that increases to as many as 24 layers by 2030. The big challenge will be in the interconnects, and making sure the microbumps align. At 16 layers, the bump pitch will be less than 10 microns, and the dies will be thinner. Damon Tsai, head of product marketi... » read more

Issues In Ramping Advanced Packaging


Multi-die assemblies require significantly more test data than a monolithic chip. Thermal mismatch between different layers can cause warping, which puts stress on the bonds that connect those layers, resulting in failures during testing. The big problem is that traditional daisy-chained test approaches cannot pinpoint where problems are occurring. Instead, they provide a go/no-go for the entir... » read more

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