Thomas Rodgers, Senior Director of Market Strategy, Head of Business Sector Electronics, ZEISS Microscopy

Mixed Outlook for 2025

We are seeing several issues affecting the semiconductor industry as we enter the new year with geopolitical volatility and economic uncertainty, and the overall growth in the market conceals a big disparity between the fortunes of the current winners and losers in the global semiconductor industry.

The semiconductor industry has historically been cyclical, so volatility is no surprise. However, we are now seeing "micro economies" develop within the industry — demand for artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) cloud infrastructure is still very strong, while parts of the industry serving automotive and industrial products are weak, especially with recent uncertainty in the market for electric vehicles.

Consequently, high-bandwidth memory and advanced packaging are taking off due to the increased adoption of heterogenous integration and “chiplet” computing architectures. As devices get smaller and packaging gets more complex, a multi-modal approach to defect localization and failure analysis becomes critical.

More than ever the key to success is time to market, and a quick turnaround in failure analysis is essential for clearing obstacles in the critical path to product launch.

For example, 3D X-ray microscopy (XRM) can be a powerful tool to guide targeted sample preparation of a 3D package, where a fs-laser integrated with a focused ion beam-scanning electron microscope (FIB-SEM) can enable rapid functional testing and fault isolation with very little damage to the package and IC.

At ZEISS, we will continue to implement new and innovative multi-modal approaches, combined with deep learning and AI, to solve our customers' challenges. We couldn’t be more excited about what the future holds for the semiconductor industry.