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 ...
Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) is one of the most important imaging techniques used in semiconductor failure analysis. While optical microscopes remain extremely useful for initial inspection, many semiconductor defects are simply too small to characterize adequately with visible-light microscopy. SEM uses a focused beam of electrons rather than light, allowing engineers ...
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 ...
Emission Microscopy (EMMI) is an optical fault-localization technique used in semiconductor failure analysis to identify electrically active defects inside integrated circuits. Instead of physically opening individual circuit structures and searching for damage, emission microscopy detects extremely weak light generated while a semiconductor device is electrically operating or biased.
Abnormal photon emission ...
Integrated circuits can fail for many different reasons. Some failures originate inside the semiconductor die, while others result from packaging, manufacturing, assembly, electrical overstress or the environment in which the device operates. Common IC failure mechanisms include electrostatic discharge (ESD), electrical overstress (EOS), electromigration, dielectric breakdown, interconnect defects, corrosion, contamination, thermal ...
Kaiserslautern, Germany – May 21, 2025 – Creonic GmbH, a leading provider of ready-to-use IP cores for ASIC and FPGA applications, announces the release of its new oFEC (Open Forward Error Correction) codec IP core. The solution supports next-generation optical and high-speed communication systems and is now available in both ...
The Qmode project is funded with an MIT-R&D collaboration project grant from the Provincie Overijssel, dedicated to stimulate the innovation and development of products, processes and services of local SMEs working in the Dutch Top Sectors. The collaboration established in Qmode will help QuiX secure a leading position in the ...
When a semiconductor device fails, the visible damage is not necessarily the root cause. A damaged metal line, cracked package, leaking transistor or burned bond wire may be the final result of a sequence of events rather than the original problem. The purpose of the semiconductor failure analysis process is therefore to ...
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 ...
