Beyond Conventional Ring Oscillators: Purpose-Built Process Detectors For Deeper Silicon Insight

By Guy Cortez, Dan Alexandrescu, and Aaron Barker The semiconductor industry has invested heavily in embedded monitors to gain visibility into advanced silicon. Those monitors are essential, but the next step is not simply to collect a larger volume of measurements. It is to design the right process characterization IP in the first place, then use analytics to turn the resulting measurements into device-level and process-level intelligence. This distinction is increasingly important as process v