Advances in artificial intelligence (AI), high performance computing (HPC), and high bandwidth memory (HBM) will transform our lives. Advanced computing chips are being developed which will lead to profound societal and commercial impacts. As Moore’s Law scaling becomes more and more challenging, advanced packaging is the path forward for the semiconductor industry to keep pace. Chiplets will play an outsized role in addressing some of the challenges.

A chiplet represents a miniature integrated circuit (IC) with distinct set of functions. Chiplets offer optimized performance and power, lower manufacturing costs, higher flexibility and scalability resulting in expedited time-to-market. Logic, memory, and photonics chiplets could be heterogeneously integrated into a higher-level assembly (system-in-package, SiP) that, in the aggregate, provides enhanced functionality and improved operating characteristics.

It is prohibitively expensive for chipmakers and integrators to heterogeneously integrate faulty chiplets into SiPs, as a single faulty chiplet could render an entire SiP useless at significant cost, time, and effort to chipmakers and integrators. Thus, it is imperative that chiplets are faultless, requiring testing innovations to monitor chiplet manufacturing and assembly processes.