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High-Speed Nanoscale Interconnects
Published in Balwinder Raj, Ashish Raman, Nanoscale Semiconductors, 2023
Somesh Kumar, Manoj Kumar Majumder
A chip, or an integrated circuit (IC), is a set of electronic components and circuits placed on a silicon substrate, and these electronic circuits and components are electrically connected to each other with the help of planar or vertical conductors called interconnects. Interconnects are primarily fabricated using metals with high-conductive properties and form the backbone for signal communication carrying data and clock signals on a chip. The design of interconnects on an IC is vital to its functionality, performance, reliability, efficiency, and overall fabrication yield. The material of interconnects is decided considering many factors, such as chemical and mechanical compatibility, electrical conductivity, and fabrication challenges [1]. The performance of ICs is increasingly dependent on the overall signal, power, and thermal integrity of these high-speed interconnects.
Polymeric Materials for Printed Electronics Application
Published in Anandhan Srinivasan, Selvakumar Murugesan, Arunjunai Raj Mahendran, Progress in Polymer Research for Biomedical, Energy and Specialty Applications, 2023
As per Forbes, the world is facing a shortage of semiconducting material in 2021. Due to this, automobile and smartphone companies expect to lose US$70–80 billion in the second half of 2021. Smartphones and automobile companies face massive losses due to the shortage of semiconducting chips and microcontrollers (Ghosh, 2021; Sharma, 2021). The primary reason for the shortage is the disruption caused in the supply chain, majorly due to the pandemic. The technology to produce semiconductor chips is quite complex and involves many steps, including wafer processing, photolithography, etching, plasma ashing, thermal treatments, and chemical vapor deposition, to name a few, before testing. This complex and lengthy process makes semiconducting chip production a time-consuming process. On the other end, semiconducting polymers are a valuable resource to fabricate electronic devices with a simple printing process that involves only a limited number of steps, including polymer synthesis, and ink formulation followed by printing of the semiconducting polymer onto the substrate and finally curing it. Semiconducting polymers can help overcome the shortage of traditional semiconductors in every aspect once the technology becomes mature, as printing electronic devices is a less time-consuming task with a limited number of steps.
Exploiting Time: The Intersection Point of Multidisciplines and the Next Challenge and Opportunity in the Making of Electronics
Published in Fei Yuan, Krzysztof Iniewski, Low-Power Circuits for Emerging Applications in Communications, Computing, and Sensing, 2018
A silicon chip, an electronic system, is used to process information. Information receivable by a human’s five senses can show its presence in many different forms: sound, light, pressure, radio wave, mechanical vibration, temperature change, shock from electrical voltage/current, taste from chemical composition, and so forth. When information enters into a silicon chip (electronic system), it can only be exhibited through electron movements, which are collectively represented as electrical voltage and/or current. Voltage and current are then used to create an electrical signal. A signal is subsequently used to create an event. At the end of this chain, the functionality of any silicon chip (electronic system) is realized through events. From the information processing perspective, the electrical signal is the foundational building piece in the construction of a silicon chip and electronic system. It is at the bottom level of abstraction. (The model of the electron/hole is at an even lower level; however, it is usually not directly dealt with by circuit- and system-level engineers but instead by physicists.)
Value proposition of predictive discarding in semiconductor manufacturing
Published in Production Planning & Control, 2022
Geert van Kollenburg, Mike Holenderski, Nirvana Meratnia
Computer chips are essential to our digital society. Currently there is a big shortage of these semiconductor chips. To solve the shortage, significant investments, like the ones made through the European Chips Act (The European Commission 2022), are needed. Next to such investments, manufacturing processes need to be optimized. The manufacturing of chips is done in batches on so-called wafers and comprises hundreds of steps. If too many chips on a wafer are faulty, all chips from that wafer will be discarded. Because chips can take up to three months to produce (Gupta et al. 2006), it is paramount that the wafers are of sufficient quality so that no resources (i.e. raw materials, time, energy) are wasted on manufacturing faulty wafers. Process monitoring and quality control are therefore crucial to avoid wasting resources on producing faulty wafers (May and Spanos 2006).
Repetitive inspection scheme based on the run length of test results: A Markov chain Monte Carlo approach
Published in Quality Engineering, 2020
As a concrete example of repetitive inspection, consider the automatic testing of computer chips in a high-speed, high-volume production line (Greenberg and Stokes 1995). The fabrication of a chip is accomplished by depositing a series of film layers upon a silicon wafer. At the final stage, packaged chips are subjected to a functionality test, during which different patterns of input are used to ensure that each chip works in accordance with manufacturing specifications. Because of inspection errors, it is possible for a non-defective chip to fail the functionality test. It is also possible that some defective chips pass the test erroneously. Because the market value of a chip is much higher than the inspection cost, it is obviously more cost-effective to reexamine each chip multiple times.
A discrete spatial model for wafer yield prediction
Published in Quality Engineering, 2018
Hao Wang, Bo Li, Seung Hoon Tong, In-Kap Chang, Kaibo Wang
Integrated circuits (ICs) are some of the most wildly used electronic components in industrial production and daily life. As realizations of ICs, chips are sets of electronic circuits that are interconnected on semiconductor material plates (wafers) to fulfill complex electronic functions. The relationship between a semiconductor wafer and the IC chips that are produced from it is illustrated in Figure 1.Figure 2Through a series of complex production procedures, hundreds or even thousands of chips, such as memory, microcomputers, and sensors, can be simultaneously fabricated on the same silicon wafer. With the rapid development of fabrication techniques, the integration scale of modern ICs has become extremely large. In recent decades, the modern IC production scale has continued to increase and has reached the level of billions (Schaller 1997; Thompson and Parthasarathy 2006).