When a semiconductor device fails, the visible damage is not necessarily the root cause. A damaged metal line, cracked package, leaking transistor or burned bond wire may be the final result of a sequence of events rather than the original problem. The purpose of the semiconductor failure analysis process is therefore to ...
Finding the right semiconductor failure analysis lab often depends less on the laboratory's name and more on whether it has the equipment and technical expertise required for your specific failure. A package delamination problem may require Scanning Acoustic Microscopy. A suspected interconnect defect may require FIB cross-sectioning and SEM inspection. Leakage ...
What is a Circuit Edit?
A circuit edit is when you need to modify an existing ASIC or integrated circuit for whatever reason. This is usually done with the help of an ion beam that is focused onto the chip to modify it as per the request of the designer. Engineers ...
Overview of Silicon-Germanium (SiGe) Technology and Historical Development
Shockley's early transistor game most likely inspired the notion of fusing silicon (Si) and germanium (Ge) to create an alloy for use in transistor engineering. However, this concept has just become a reality in the last 15 years due to the challenges associated ...
Gallium arsenide (GaAs) technology is a type of semiconductor material used in the manufacturing of various electronic devices. It is known for its high electron mobility, which allows it to operate at higher speeds and with lower power consumption compared to other semiconductor materials such as silicon. GaAs technology is ...
Nanoprobing is an advanced electrical characterization and fault-localization technique used in semiconductor failure analysis to directly investigate individual transistors, contacts, vias and interconnect structures inside an integrated circuit.
Instead of relying only on package-level electrical measurements, nanoprobing allows extremely small conductive structures on a deprocessed semiconductor die to be contacted using ...
Emission Microscopy (EMMI) is an optical fault-localization technique used in semiconductor failure analysis to identify electrically active defects inside integrated circuits. Instead of physically opening individual circuit structures and searching for damage, emission microscopy detects extremely weak light generated while a semiconductor device is electrically operating or biased.
Abnormal photon emission ...
The NVM Express (NVMe) specification has been introduced in 2011. Five years later, it is definitely adopted as the new standard storage interface for Solid-State Drives (SSD). Even if SAS and SATA SSDs are still dominating the market (in unit shipment), the PCIe SSD market share is growing fast and ...
With a rapid progression in the applications involving artificial intelligence, data generation has been increased exponentially in last few years. It has been estimated that in 2018, 2,5 quintillion bytes of data is generated every day [1]. This huge data generation puts enormous computational requirements on telecom platforms and data ...
IC short circuit failure analysis is the process of determining where an unintended electrical connection exists inside a semiconductor device, package or interconnect structure and identifying the physical defect that created the short.
A short circuit may initially appear only as excessive supply current, unexpectedly low resistance between two nodes, abnormal ...
