Today’s semiconductor market demands ever greater computing power in smaller node sizes, outpacing the traditional growth rate of Moore’s Law. To keep pace, leading manufacturers are adopting advanced packaging: integrating multiple chiplets into more efficient 2.5D or 3D packages.

This evolution creates new challenges: managing complex multi-chiplet production, mixed-product lots, and item-level device tracking.

The core challenge: How do you achieve complete device tracking for quality and compliance without compromising production efficiency?

Most manufacturers cannot perform single device tracking without slowing operations—a critical challenge that must be overcome amid surging demand and global semiconductor shortages.

Semiconductor market requirements

Growing product complexity has resulted in semiconductor demand reaching an all-time high, and expectations for chip innovation just keep soaring.

We are living in a time when there has never been a greater expectation for chip innovation.”                                                                  

– Frank Schaldach

For over 50 years, Moore’s Law has been the key driver of chip innovation—accurately predicting that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit will double about every two years, which has led to exponential growth in computing power and efficiency for the industry. However, with the continuous shrinking of node sizes, we may be approaching the physical limitations of miniaturization. The industry has noted that the rate of Moore’s Law appears to be slowing down, evidenced by the fact that with each successive iteration, chip shrinking takes longer and costs more.

Today, we are not that far away from the theoretical physical limit, which is thought to be 0.34nm, and keeping in mind that silicon’s atomic size is about 0.2 nm, you can see why the industry is looking for new ways to go beyond Moore’s Law.”

 – Frank Schaldach

Beyond Moore’s Law: The world of Advanced Packaging

The revolutionary new concept for chip innovation is based on high density advanced packaging, which enables the combination of multiple, diverse chips (chiplets) into one unit to improve performance, power efficiency, and cost-effectiveness without needing to shrink transistors further.  

Instead of one large monolithic integrated circuit, the functionality is separated to a set of smaller dies that are tightly interconnected.

The diagram below shows a 3D die stacking model having one master die, and 3 slave dies on top that are connected using silicon vias.

The result: higher yield because of smaller dies, overall, 10% reduced manufacturing cost, increased performance, and a process optimized to IP blocks and greater flexibility. It is now even possible to combine chips from different vendors and make individual chiplets.

Key semiconductor players are adopting high density advanced packaging to drive innovation.

Industry leaders including Intel, AMD and TSMC have all committed to advanced packaging architectures as the primary path forward.

These developments in advanced packaging are becoming mainstream and are foundational in the next phase of Moore‘s Law.

Why quality is now the key competitive factor

A recent semiconductor manufacturing survey by Tech-Clarity² shows that product quality and product reliability are key success factors.

In view of advanced packaging, several chips could be included in each MCM or chiplet, creating many opportunities for quality problems. This is why detailed tracking and tracing for each individual device in a chiplet is imperative.

Speed is also critical, as single device processing must also be equipped to maintain full production capacity to meet the pace of global demand.

Single device processing and tracking basics

Single device tracking typically requires production slowdowns—a trade-off that semiconductor manufacturers can no longer afford in today’s accelerated market.

However, a high-performance computing solution integrated with MES can upgrade single-device forward tracking and control at production speed to optimize capacity and avoid the need for additional capital.  

The critical difference between tracing and tracking

Most people use these terms interchangeably. But they’re fundamentally different:

Tracing answers the past: “Where did this come from?” It’s backward-looking genealogy.

Traceability is the ability to trace a device’s current status back to its point of origin, providing an audit trail. For example, to trace where a device comes from on the wafer, you must begin at the start of fabrication.

Traceability answers the backward question: it shows customers materials, origins, processing steps, equipment, and conditions for every device.

Customers demand both: complete history (traceability) and real-time visibility (tracking). Together, they provide the complete picture customers require today.

Because quality is increasingly critical, we must ensure that the traceability and the tracking we provide in our systems be able to provide sufficient detail needed to identify where quality issues are arising.”

– Dimitry Wishaupt

Why is single item traceability (SIT) essential today?

• Quality
  • Quality requirements are becoming more stringent. Most semiconductor companies are experiencing higher expectations for product quality than even their customers—72 percent report stronger demand for quality.
  • The cost of non-quality is increasing. The cost of quality failures is increasingly being pushed upstream to semiconductor suppliers, raising the stakes for traceability data completeness.
• Product Complexity
  • Complex products cannot be tracked and traced using conventional means.
  • For example, multi-chip modules (MCM), systems in packages (SIPs), and Insulated-gate bipolar transistor modules (IGBTs), need to be tracked at sub-device or chiplet level as well as the final package.
• Product Mix
  • Product mix is getting increasingly complex as customers are requesting specific capabilities and legacy products need to be supported for longer durations.
  • Enhanced automation and smart manufacturing capabilities can support high product variability on the shopfloor without impacting output—enabling manufacturers to treat every single device as its own lot if needed.

Shopfloor systems need to be able to keep up with enhanced tracking and tracing capabilities resulting from higher product variability. These SIT requirements do not just apply to semiconductor products; also, batteries, PCB’s and solar panels are examples of high-volume products requiring single item tracking.

What are the challenges of single item traceability?

• 1) Tracking of single device serial numbers throughout the manufacturing processes
  • This requires a serial number to be scribed, tagged (e.g. RFID) or pasted onto the device.
  • This can be a challenge if there is not enough space on the device or the application of a serial ID can affect the processing and/or the quality of the device.
  • Also, all the relevant processing equipment needs to be able to read this serial ID which adds costs and complexity to the equipment.
• 2) Tracking can also be done by collecting coordinates of devices in carriers and equipment
  • For example, a die is taken from wafer 123 from coordinate (x,y) to strip ABC to coordinate (p,q).
  • The total traceability data cannot then be retrieved by looking up the Serial ID but needs to be inferred from the sequence of x,y,z translocations that have occurred during the production process.

Carriers / Item Structures

The Single Item Tracking solution provides functionality to start Individual serial lot(s) with or without a Parent. The solution also generates Carrier Lots with a lot is assigned to a Carrier whether it is Item Lots or Carrier Lots being assigned.

During standard transactional processing, the Parent or Child lots can be tracked through any step and primary action – MoveIn, TrackIn, TrackOut or Moveout.  The solution syncs the processed lots to the Child or Parent lots as required to maintain traceability of all single items.  HPE transactions are used during this processing to optimize speed for high volume containers.

Tracking and tracing must be flexible enough to adapt to different component types.

Let’s look at a few examples.

Example 1: Hard disk heads manufacturer

In this example, full genealogy can be maintained without the need to split or merge actual lots within the MES:

• First Tier – Wafer Lot – all units being tracked processed together (background, etc)
• Second Tier – Section Lot – just the bars in a section of the wafer tracked at the same time (clean, bake)
• Third Tier – Bar Lot – each bar is tracked individually (wire bond, lapping)
• Bars are singulated and individual units are sorted based on characteristics
• Individual heads are placed on gimbal

Example 2: IGBT (Insulated-Gate Bipolar Transistor) manufacturer

An IGBT module contains multiple integrated circuits (ICs) installed on a printed circuit board (PCB). Each IC carries its own set of traceable ID numbers, and the PCB itself carries an additional set of traceable IDs. This creates a multi-level traceability hierarchy—from individual components to the complete assembly, which can be traced accurately on down the chain.

Managing traceability at this scale and beyond requires a fundamental shift in how data is stored and accessed. Modern MES platforms must be architected to handle complexity efficiently and reliably.

MES is the key source of data for traceability. But we typically have two databases. We have a production database. And we have a reporting database. The production database must be purged periodically to keep the production speed fast. But the reporting database is able to keep the data for as long as you need it.” 

– Dimitry Wishaupt

What are the challenges of single item tracking?

Performance

With millions of devices to be traced, first of all the greatest challenge is achieving performance to prevent impacting shopfloor output.

Going from lot level or even wafer level traceability to single item traceability can increase the amount of transactions MES needs to process by multiple orders of magnitude.

Traditional MES is typically not architected to manage these types of transaction levels.

Flexibility

Also, the system needs to be flexible to support a multitude of trackable entities and switching between these (processing a wafer at one step, a carrier with items at the next and individual items after that for example).

You must have the flexibility to easily switch back and forth from these different levels of traceability for both automatic and manual production flows.”

 – Dimitry Wishaupt

Analytics

Tracking and traceability data is valuable only if you can extract and report on it effectively. Without efficient, actionable reporting, you lose visibility into quality, compliance, and product performance.

Reporting is critical to customer acceptance and faster time to market. The right analytics platform transforms raw tracking data into insights that drive informed decisions and reduce risk for both manufacturers and customers.

The high-performance solution approach

To enable single item traceability Siemens R&D has rearchitected the Opcenter EX server and built a High Performance Engine (or HPE) within it.”

 – Dimitry Wishaupt

It is essential to not slow down the shop floor equipment while you pull tracking information.”

– Dimitry Wishaupt

What has Siemens R&D achieved to realize single item tracking?

Siemens developed a fundamentally different approach to single item tracking—one that transforms it into a high-speed operation without compromising shop floor performance. The solution, called HPE (High-Performance Engine), shifts processing load from the application server to the database server, dramatically reducing the number of round trips required between the two.

A significant number of shopfloor transactions has been modified to utilize the HPE.

New objects, shopfloor transactions and relationships have been added to support a flexible SIT model.

High volume, multi-server testing has been performed to prove the solution is robust and fast (achieving > 300 MES transactions per second).

The results are remarkable. Semiconductor leaders can now achieve up to 98% improvement in HPE transaction execution time compared to standard execution—a significant advantage when processing parents with more than 1,000 child lots.

With the Siemens HPE, we’re now able to track thousands of transactions per second to keep pace with customer demands.”

– Dimitry Wishaupt

Advanced packaging is reshaping semiconductor manufacturing today. We’ve added a few of the critical advanced packaging questions below that manufacturers need to answer. Please take a few minutes to review them and explore the links provided for additional insights.

Ready to eliminate the bottleneck in single device tracking?

Watch the full webinar Single device tracking that supports advanced semiconductor packaging | Siemens

Or download the compelling white paper Semiconductor Manufacturing with Single Device Tracking | Siemens