Many important semiconductor package defects are completely hidden from optical inspection. A solder ball can contain a void. A bond wire can be broken inside an encapsulated package. A die-attach layer may contain large areas of voiding. A package substrate can contain an open trace, and an advanced package may have ...
The Chinese Ministry of Commerce today announced immediate export restrictions on gallium, germanium, antimony, and super-hard materials to the United States. This action cites national security concerns and represents a significant escalation of trade tensions between the two countries. The restrictions follow recent U.S. actions to curb exports of semiconductor-related ...
PHIX B.V. of Enschede, The Netherlands, is a Dutch packaging foundry that assembles their customers’ photonic integrated circuits into complete modules. As these modules evolve from initial prototypes into mature products, the manufacturing volumes become much larger and a higher level of automation is required. This aspect of photonic device ...
Chiplets are a relatively recent advancement in semiconductor technology that involves breaking down a traditional monolithic integrated circuit (IC) into smaller, individual semiconductor components or "chiplets." These chiplets can be designed and manufactured independently, and then they are integrated onto a common substrate or package to create a more complex ...
The factors affecting silicon wafer cost are numerous. From the resistivity required for different applications to the physical size of the wafers, and not least the quality grades that separate the pristine from the less perfect; each aspect intricately influences the cost.
As we embark on this explanation, we'll unwrap the ...
Overview of Silicon-Germanium (SiGe) Technology and Historical Development
Shockley's early transistor game most likely inspired the notion of fusing silicon (Si) and germanium (Ge) to create an alloy for use in transistor engineering. However, this concept has just become a reality in the last 15 years due to the challenges associated ...
With the creeping rise in the price of gold, many microelectronics manufacturing companies have been looking for alternatives to reduce the cost of ball bonding. Recently, the trend has been to look into the use copper wire. However, there are many drawbacks to using copper wire, including the short shelf ...
The NVM Express (NVMe) specification has been introduced in 2011. Five years later, it is definitely adopted as the new standard storage interface for Solid-State Drives (SSD). Even if SAS and SATA SSDs are still dominating the market (in unit shipment), the PCIe SSD market share is growing fast and ...
The semiconductor industry went through several stages of evolution, beginning with the Metal Oxide Semiconductor (MOS) Field-Effect Transistor (FET) which was first proposed by Lilienfeld and Heil in the 1930s, moving on to bipolar in the 1950s and N-channel metal-oxide semiconductor (NMOS) in 1970s, and ultimately becoming the standard in ...
When an integrated circuit fails, identifying the damaged component is only part of the challenge. Engineers must determine where the failure occurred, what physical or electrical mechanism caused it, and ultimately why it happened. This requires a combination of specialized IC failure analysis techniques. Some techniques detect electrical abnormalities without physically altering ...
