Resources
Material worth the reading time.
Briefings, evaluation protocols and technical notes for packaging, yield, quality and IT/OT teams assessing an autonomy layer — including the ones that argue against buying one.
Briefings
For the people who have to decide
- 01 The advanced-packaging bottleneck
Why back-end capacity now gates the AI compute buildout, and what that means for yield economics on a CoWoS-class package.
- 02 Autonomy without losing control
The graduated-autonomy model explained for a change-control board: gates, envelopes, twin validation, audit and revocation.
- 03 Process IP in an AI deployment
A plain-language architecture note for IP and legal teams on tenancy, edge inference and what does and does not leave the building.
- 04 Building the pilot business case
How to size the value of one yield point on your package family, and how to write a success metric your finance team will accept.
Evaluation tools
Use these on us, and on everyone else
The shadow-mode protocol
A step-by-step protocol for establishing a defensible baseline before any vendor writes to a tool — including how long to run, what to record and how to handle variance.
- Baseline period sizing
- Variance and confidence handling
- Comparison methodology
The vendor question set
Thirty questions for any AI vendor selling into a fab. Roughly a third of them are ones we find uncomfortable, which is why they are worth asking.
- Measured versus modelled claims
- Write-back and fail-safe design
- Data isolation and training scope
Fab-edge readiness checklist
What your OT network, tool interfaces, identity provider and change-control process need to look like before any deployment is realistic.
- Interface inventory
- Network segmentation
- Identity and role mapping
Pilot success-metric template
The structure of a metric that produces a decision: definition, baseline, measurement owner, duration, and what constitutes failure.
- Single-metric discipline
- Named measurement owner
- Pre-agreed failure condition
Editorial position
We publish the arguments against us too
Most vendor resource libraries are a funnel dressed as a service. The material exists to make one conclusion feel inevitable, which is exactly why experienced buyers ignore it.
Ours includes the counter-arguments: the reasons a fab should refuse write-back access, the conditions under which an incumbent’s point tool is the better purchase, and the organisational failure modes that make a pilot inconclusive regardless of the technology.
This is not modesty. A buyer who evaluates us rigorously and still proceeds is a far better customer than one who was persuaded — and a buyer who correctly decides we are wrong for them has saved us both a year.
Technical notes
For engineers
- 01 Grounding and citation enforcement
How retrieval over recipes, specs, design rules and standards is constructed, and why uncited output is rejected rather than surfaced.
- 02 Twin validation before write-back
What the package-and-line twin actually simulates, what it does not, and how its confidence band gates an action.
- 03 The supervised-correction flywheel
How engineer approvals and rejections become labelled data, and how retraining is gated so it cannot silently degrade a line.
- 04 Connector fail-safe semantics
Idempotency, transactional write-back, envelope-breach behaviour and degradation to existing tool control.
- 05 Model versioning on a production line
Immutable releases, per-site pinning, staged rollout and why nothing auto-updates.
- 06 Cross-fab learning, contractually
The mechanism, its value, its risks, and why it is opt-in under a separate agreement rather than a platform default.
Context
Numbers worth carrying into a meeting
- $30B Advanced-packaging automation, process control, inspection, test and fab software market.
- ~16% Annual growth, pulled by AI accelerators, HBM and the chiplet transition.
- $7.5B The segment addressable by autonomous control, packaging vision, yield optimisation and twins.
- 12+ Tool classes on a typical line — none of which can see the others today.
Chipira’s internal market estimates [ASPIRATIONAL], derived from public segment data.
Manufacturing operations directorOSAT, advanced packagingSend me the document that explains why I should not do this. That is the one I will actually read.
Composite drawn from design-partner and industry conversations. Illustrative, not a customer endorsement.
Connector coverage across the back end
- ASMPT
- BESI
- Kulicke & Soffa
- EV Group
- SUSS MicroTec
- TOWA
- Nordson
- Camtek
- Onto Innovation
- Advantest
- Teradyne
- Cohu
Vendor-neutral integration over SECS-GEM, tool APIs and OT interfaces. Vendors listed are integration targets for the connector library and are not endorsements or commercial partnerships.
How to get them
Access
Some material is open; some describes deployment specifics and is shared under NDA.
- Open
- Market briefings, the vendor question set, the pilot success-metric template and the readiness checklist. Ask and we send them.
- Under NDA
- Architecture and security packs, the API and connector reference, the audit schema and the evaluation methodology.
- On request during diligence
- Company stage evidence, incorporation detail, sub-processor list and the exit and wind-down terms.
- Never
- Customer names, package specifics or process data belonging to anyone else. Including yours, later.
Resources
Practical questions
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For the open material, an email so we can send it. There is no drip sequence attached to it and you can ask us to delete the address afterwards.
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Yes — the open material is meant to be forwarded to your quality, IT/OT and finance teams. That is who several of the documents are actually written for.
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Yes. A working session with your process, quality and OT people is usually more useful than the documents alone, and we do not charge for it.
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The evaluation tools are deliberately vendor-neutral. Use the question set on every vendor in your process, including us.
Start narrow, expand relentlessly
Land one workflow. Own the loop.
A Chipira engagement begins with a single wedge workflow, a shadow-mode baseline and one signed success metric. Everything after that is expansion.