The Electric: The Chip Industry’s Production Hell Has Lessons for EVs

The auto industry, beset by painful cost overruns and delays in its rollout of electric vehicles, is confronting some of the same problems that semiconductor companies had to overcome decades ago, industry executives say.

On Live Chat With The Electric last week, Michael Yu, vice president of the advanced solution group of semiconductor analytics company PDF Solutions, said that in the 1990s and 2000s, the semiconductor industry faced a chronic problem of defective chips as it sought to sharply ramp up production. In response, it developed automated systems to inspect chips and resolve defects during production. He said manufacturers can apply the same systems to batteries, including machine learning, which speeds up the discovery of defects.