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In situ lift out is a mature and well established technique for TEM sample preparation [1]. There are occasions though, when lift out fails, and the TEM lamella falls into the TEM trench during sample preparation. In a previous study [2], the lamella can be rescued through a series of steps involving welding, tilting, cutting free and rewelding the lamella onto a grid or die. In this paper, we detail...
Ultrasonic cleaner is a workhorse in all failure analysis labs for residue removal after decapsulation or etching. In this paper, we present a novel method of ultrasonic decapsulation, where acid mixture was used in conjunction with ultrasonic agitation and was discovered to provide exceptionally high quality preservation of the surface of the copper bond wires which exceeds the quality of laser decap...
In this paper, a method to detect shorts at the gates of the storage node of a 6T SRAM bit cell via atomic force probing (AFP) at the Via 1 level is discussed. This method is useful for the preservation of physical evidence as well as to ease the probing operation due to the lower density and larger separations of vias compared to contacts. One particular case of single bit failure is documented,...
Under non-optimized wafer probe and wire bonding conditions, pad cratering/interlevel dielectric (ILD) cracks may result in an electrical failure. The conventional procedures to analyse these failures include fault localization, optical inspection, SEM inspection and Focused Ion Beam cross-section, which can be very time consuming. In this paper, we introduce a method to detect these failure more...
Copper dendrites on a flip chip die was analysed by SEM/EDX, FIB and TEM. The dendrites were found to consist of two layers. The upper layer visible under optical and SEM inspection consist of a carbon rich copper compound. TEM analysis revealed another layer under this carbon rich layer that consist of copper, tin and lead compounds. A possible mechanism of dendrite formation due to an electrochemical...
A single bit cell SRAM failure with shorted bit line (BL) and bit line bar (BLB) storage nodes were analyzed. Instead of using top down deprocessing to localize the defect, a modified approach incorporating Atomic Force Probe (AFP) and STEM dark field imaging of a thick sample were used. Using the modified approach the single bit cell failure was found to be due to a titanium particle on the spacer...
In analysis of copper wire moisture related reliability failures long hours are spent on the FIB tool. Two techniques are introduced to reduce the long analysis time: 1) An alternative FIB trenching method that reduces milling duration by 5X and, 2) A “FIB-free” approach using laser ablation
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