Process Control
9 pieces tagged Process Control.
Pieces
Everyone Is Announcing Capacity. Nobody Is Announcing The Number That Decides It.
Nobody is announcing yield — and only one of those decides whether the wafers are worth selling.
Your Factory Already Solved AI's Biggest Problem
Gartner predicts that by 2027, 40% of enterprises will demote or decommission their autonomous AI agents — and the reason is not that the AI underperformed. It is that governance gaps only became visible after a production incident.
imec Says Fabs Can't Measure Every Wafer. So 95% Are Predicted.
In a fab running virtual metrology, only one to five percent of wafers are physically measured. The rest get a number anyway — predicted by a model that reads the process tools rather than the wafer: gas flows, RF power, chamber pressure, roughly a thousand sensor variables per run, turned into a thickness, a line…
Your Fab's AI Goes Blind on the 2nm Node — Here's Why
Your fab's new AI spots defects better than any engineer — and on the brand-new node it goes almost blind. Not because the model is bad, but because every one of these systems learns from history: thousands of wafers, labelled defects, known-good outcomes.
The 6-Inch Wafer That Every AI Data Center Depends On
NVIDIA just put $2 billion into a chip factory that runs six-inch wafers — not the twelve-inch wafers the rest of the industry moved to decades ago. The reason is that the chips moving data between processors inside an AI data center aren't silicon at all: they're indium phosphide, and the lasers built on it…
AI Now Lets Chip Fabs "Measure" Wafers They Never Touch (Virtual Metrology)
Chip factories physically measure only about 3 wafers in 100. For the other 97, an AI called virtual metrology predicts the exact dimension straight from the process tool's own sensor "fingerprint" — pressure, power, gas flow, hundreds of signals per wafer — in milliseconds, with no measurement step and no throughput hit.
Chips Just Got Flipped Over — Why Your Next AI Chip Gets Power From the Back
For sixty years, a computer chip carried its power and its data on the same side — the front. As transistors shrank to 2nm, that surface ran out of room: the fat power wires choke the thin signal wires and the transistors droop, quietly capping speed.
NVIDIA's Chip Is Finished — It Still Can't Ship (The Real AI Bottleneck)
NVIDIA's fastest AI chip has been finished for months — and it still can't ship. The reason isn't the 2-nanometer transistor everyone's racing toward; it's the very last step, advanced packaging.
Chip Factories Only Check 10% of Their Wafers — Here's the AI That Sees the Rest
A modern chip fab physically measures fewer than 1 in 10 wafers — the other 90% ship out never directly checked, because real metrology is slow and a fab runs thousands of wafers a day. In 2026 that changed: AI "virtual metrology" now predicts the quality of the wafers you never measured, straight from the…