Laser Ablation for Throughput Increase in Large Volume Semiconductor Failure Analysis Tasks

Abstract

As the semiconductor industry demands higher throughput for failure analysis, there is a constant need to rapidly speed up the sample preparation workflows. Here we present extended capabilities of the standard Xe plasma Focused Ion Beam failure analysis workflows by implementing a standalone laser ablation tool. Time-to-sample advantages of such workflow is shown on four distinct applications: cross-sectioning of a large solder ball, cross-sectioning of a deeply buried wire bond, cross-sectioning of the device layer of an OLED display, and removing the MEMS silicon cap to access underlying structures. In all of these workflows we have shown significant decrease in required process time while altogether avoiding the disadvantages of corresponding mechanical and chemical methods.

Pairing Laser Ablation and Xe Plasma FIB-SEM: An Approach for Precise End-Pointing in Large-Scale Physical Failure Analysis in the Semiconductor Industry

“…With that in mind, in this work we present a large-volume workflow [1,2] for fast failure analysis of microelectronic devices that combines a stand-alone ps-laser [3,4] ablation tool with a Xe Plasma FIB-SEM system. In this synergy, the ps-laser is used to quickly remove large volumes of bulk material while the Xe Plasma FIB-SEM is used for fine surface polishing after laser processing with precise end-pointing capability to reach and stop at the feature of interest.…”