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1 week ago | 
semiengineering.com | Gregory Haley
Electron-beam inspection is proving to be indispensable for finding critical defects at sub-5nm dimensions. The challenge now is how to speed up the process to make it economically palatable to fabs. E-beam inspection’s notorious sensitivity-throughput tradeoff has made comprehensive defect coverage with e-beam at these advanced nodes especially problematic.
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3 weeks ago | 
semiengineering.com | Gregory Haley
As packaging complexity increases and nodes shrink, defect detection becomes significantly more difficult. Engineers must contend with subtle variations introduced during fabrication and assembly without sacrificing throughput. New material stacks degrade signal-to-noise ratios, which makes metrology more difficult.
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4 weeks ago | 
semiengineering.com | Gregory Haley
Advanced packaging has evolved far beyond the simple stacking of dies and connecting of interposers. Once a passive conduit between silicon and the outside world, it has become an active component of overall device performance.
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1 month ago | 
semiengineering.com | Gregory Haley
Detecting sub-5nm defects creates huge challenges for chipmakers, challenges that have a direct impact on yield, reliability, and profitability. In addition to being smaller and harder to detect, defects are often hidden beneath intricate device structures and packaging schemes. Moreover, traditional optical and electrical probing methods, trusted for decades, are proving inadequate against the complexity of modern chip architectures.
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1 month ago | 
semiengineering.com | Gregory Haley
Interposers and substrates are undergoing a profound transformation from intermediaries to engineered platforms responsible for power distribution, thermal management, high-density interconnects, and signal integrity in the most advanced computing systems. This shift is being driven by AI, high-performance computing (HPC), and next-generation communications, where the need for heterogeneous integration is pushing the limits of packaging technologies.
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1 month ago | 
chiplet-marketplace.com | Gregory Haley
New materials and processes will help with power distribution and thermal dissipation in advanced packages. By Gregory Haley, Semi Engineering | March 24th, 2025Interposers and substrates are undergoing a profound transformation from intermediaries to engineered platforms responsible for power distribution, thermal management, high-density interconnects, and signal integrity in the most advanced computing systems.
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2 months ago | 
semiengineering.com | Gregory Haley
Failure analysis (FA) is an essential step for achieving sufficient yield in semiconductor manufacturing, but it’s struggling to keep pace with smaller dimensions, advanced packaging, and new power delivery architectures. All of these developments make defects harder to find and more expensive to fix, which impacts the reliability of chips and systems.
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2 months ago | 
semiengineering.com | Gregory Haley
Demand for medical ICs used inside and outside the body is growing rapidly, but unique manufacturing and functional requirements coupled with low volumes have turned this into a complex and extremely challenging market. Few semiconductor applications demand this level of precision, reliability, and long-term stability.
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2 months ago | 
semiengineering.com | Gregory Haley
The rapidly increasing demand for advanced-node chips to support everything-AI is putting pressure on the industry’s ability to meet demand. The need for cutting-edge semiconductors is accelerating in applications ranging from hyperscale data centers powering large language models to edge AI in smartphones, IoT devices, and autonomous systems. But manufacturing those chips relies heavily on extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, which has become one of the biggest barriers to scaling production.
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Feb 12, 2025 | 
semiengineering.com | Gregory Haley
Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to explore how AI impacts design for testability, with Jeorge Hurtarte, senior director of product marketing in the Semiconductor Test Group at Teradyne; Sri Ganta, director of test products at Synopsys; Dave Armstrong, principal test strategist at Advantest; and Lee Harrison, director of Tessent automotive IC solutions at Siemens EDA. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. To view part one of this discussion, click here.
