Ben Mitchel, senior director of Teradyne's Integrated System Test division, explains why system-level test has become critical for mass production of AI and data center equipment. These devices use multi-chiplet designs and draw thousands of watts, requiring testing under real-world conditions. The Titan HP platform delivers the power, thermal management, and throughput such devices demand.
Semiconductor process control is shifting from visual inspection to electrical measurement. In advanced packaging, residual charge and static accumulation are hard to detect with conventional inspection and metrology, yet they affect yield, device reliability and manufacturing consistency; the problem grows worse with hygroscopic films, dielectric layers and plasma processes. Onto Innovation offers full-wafer mapping and panel-level high-resolution mapping to locate local non-uniformities and hotspots.
As heterogeneous integration evolves from 2.5D interposers and CoWoS to hybrid bonding and 3D stacking, the yield sensitivity and defect mechanisms of advanced packaging differ sharply from front-end logic and standard packaging, and the industry has long lacked dedicated metrology, characterization and analysis frameworks. The article presents an integrated methodology to accelerate advanced packaging process development and sustain production control.
Semiconductor fabs are using real-time equipment sensor data and AI/ML inference models to move yield anomaly detection inside process modules, accelerating yield learning and improving advanced process control (APC). Equipment sensor sampling has risen from about once per second to once every few tens of milliseconds, data types have grown at least 10x compared with a decade ago, and some fabs generate hundreds of petabytes per year. How to process data in sub-second timescales while preserving context and connectivity is the main data management challenge shift left brings.
Every test, inspection and monitoring method for advanced chips has physical, spatial or temporal blind spots, and no single technology provides a complete picture. Vendors including Nordson, ZEISS and Teradyne note that defects such as solder voids and head-in-pillow can pass electrical test yet cause early failures, while X-ray still faces trade-offs among precision, throughput and resolution for stacked dies and TSV inspection.
In advanced packaging, defects accumulate value step by step through the process flow, and shrinking feature sizes push inspection requirements toward front-end levels, spanning surface particles, sidewall cracks, buried defects, microbump anomalies and bonding voids. Manufacturers need to combine complementary methods—high-sensitivity 2D inspection, infrared subsurface inspection and 3D metrology—in a unified workflow, balancing sensitivity with throughput, and use effective classification to turn inspection results into actionable process information.