KLA is a longtime participant and sponsor of the upcoming SPIE Advanced Lithography Digital Forum held on February 22-26, 2021. SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, was founded in 1955 to advance light-based technologies. They organize major technical events, including #SPIElitho, a key forum to discuss challenges for semiconductor manufacturing across topics including lithography, patterning, inspection and metrology, and process integration.

Given the recent buzz about the importance of semiconductor chips to the automotive industry, our SPIE keynote presentation is a must-see! “The Emergence of Inline Screening for High Volume Manufacturing” will be presented by Oreste Donzella, KLA’s executive vice president of the Electronics, Packaging and Components (EPC) group. This presentation is focused on automotive semiconductor reliability and will take place in the Metrology Keynote Session on Thursday, February 25 at 8am PST. The virtual forum will include a live Q&A session.

Five Key Messages from Oreste’s Presentation:

1. Semiconductors are at the core of innovation in today’s automobiles. Now that cars are relying on semiconductors for safety-critical applications like Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems (ADAS), it is more important than ever to ensure high reliability for semiconductor chips.
2. Traditionally, older-generation chips were used in cars because their manufacturing processes were extremely stable, which resulted in high reliability. New features are demanding more advanced semiconductor chips to provide the required processing power. These chips face more yield and reliability challenges.
3. Semiconductor reliability failures occur because of problems that are missed during the testing process or issues that don’t appear until later. Missed defects occur because testing does not cover 100% of the chip. Latent reliability defects can initially pass the testing procedure and potentially cause a failure later. Take a closer look at latent reliability defects:

4. New techniques are needed to help improve reliability in advanced semiconductor chips. KLA’s automotive solutions go beyond traditional methods to add an additional safety net to recognize at-risk chips. Our I-PAT^® (Inline Defect Part Average Testing) method combines optical defect screening with analysis from powerful machine learning algorithms to find latent defects and screen out high-risk chips before they end up in the car.
5. The trend for more stringent semiconductor chip reliability requirements extends beyond automotive. Hyperscaling data centers include millions of cutting-edge servers that use high-end processing and memory chips that need to operate around the clock without failure. Additionally, today’s electronics are utilizing new complex semiconductor packaging technologies with multiple chips combined into a single package – an architecture where reliability failures in one chip can affect the entire packaged device.

Besides our #SPIElitho keynote presentation, KLA has multiple papers with key partners in the technical sessions that demonstrate how process control innovations support advanced patterning for semiconductors. We encourage everyone who can attend to do so! More information can be found on the conference website.