Zardon

The Straits Times of Singapore is reporting that AMD has bought five machines from Semicaps which will pick up bugs and flaws in semiconductor processing and allow fast re-starts at the fabs.

Flaws in silicon can cost chip firms millions if they're not fixed quickly, or, even worse, get into the wild and are then discovered by journalists.

The machines cost around US$1 million and the newspaper says that they will be installed in facilities in Texas, Singapore and California.

Semicaps is a firm that was spun off by the National University of Singapore, the report says.

The machines will pinpoint potential failures in the silicon earlier and that will increase so-called yields on the wafers, which are cut up and then packaged to become the central processing unit or "brain" of a PC.

Without such laser-based technology, the paper explains, flaws or "bugs" can take weeks or months to uncover.

source: the inquirer