Chips off the old block

Imperfect microchips cost chip makers millions of dollars a year. Up to half of the chips cut from each silicon wafer can be duds, but it’s so expensive to identify individual faults that most are thrown away. To cut down on this wastage, Finnish communications company Nokia plans to divide the circuitry in each chip into around 100 blocks, which can quickly be checked for faults. Any defective chips will then be sorted into batches with faults in the same blocks (GB 2367655). The chips can then run specially adapted software that doesn’t use the damaged areas of the chips.…