The Semiconductor industry is the innovation engine of the world. As Moore’s Law slows down, new devices architecture emerges. PDF Solutions creates unique data and uses AI to enable insights and rapid improvements in yield, quality and efficiency for design and manufacturing processes.
Semiconductors are the electronic brains in devices humans use in daily life. All major services from commerce, banking and communications to transportation are enabled by those semiconductors running their support infrastructure. About 40% of the growth in GDP in the developed world comes from improving information processing.
The semiconductor industry is the innovation engine that has made innovation possible across all the other industries. This is directly related to Moore’s Law; the ability to do more computing on less dollars by shrinking the transistor size and increasing their density into each new generation of semiconductor devices. But Moore’s Law is an exponent. Any exponent comes to an end and can’t go on forever. Now the industry is starting to look for other ways to continue to bring more computing to the world at a lower price.
Success in semiconductor manufacturing is directly related to the ability to analyze massive amounts of data and use the insights to improve the manufacturing process. For over 30 years, PDF Solutions has provided advanced analytics and unique data to the semiconductor ecosystem. The data PDF Solutions creates and the AI tools it provides deliver the insights that semiconductor companies use to bring new processes and new products to market at a much faster pace than they can on their own.
With the slowdown of Moore’s Law, we are now seeing new types of semiconductor designs called 3D; that is stacking chips on top of each other. This transforms the way semiconductors are designed and the way they are produced, tested, and the overall supply chain of the industry. Traditional methods used to test 2D semiconductors cannot be used for these new 3D architectures. With 3D devices, the industry needs to see the invisible in the third dimension. PDF Solutions has developed a unique electron beam machine, called e-probe, to understand the interaction between the new 3D processes and the quality of these advanced 3D chips. Guided by and optimized with AI, the e-probe scans the device at a speed of millions of nanometers per second, and tests specific locations in tens of nanoseconds and billions of times in one hour. The data is then analyzed using AI in PDF Solutions global data and analytics platform.
This technology is now used all over the world to bring to market the latest and most advanced computer chips that will drive the future advancements of AI in every industry segment.
The technical progress of the semiconductor of the past 50 years is unprecedented. Yet today, computing and AI remain inefficient compared to the human brain. PDF Solutions plays a key part in figuring out how to make computing as efficient as the human brain, but at scale. This will require more software, more analytics, new products to be tested, and test data to be analyzed.
PDF solutions is the backbone of data analytics for the chip industry and will usher in the democratization of AI for everyone.
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