Abstract
Accurate root cause determination of integrated circuit devices necessitates the preservation of evidence during failure analysis. Identifying the cause of systemic defects requires capturing physical evidence provided by very few customer returns. Each piece of physical evidence is valuable due to the scarcity of returns in most cases less than 1 ppm. Harvesting infrequent physical evidence requires that each attempt to decapsulate a fail unit has a high probability of retaining the material that caused the defect. A measured method that retains the critical evidence is the fastest way to solve a defect driven systemic failure mechanism because one gathers the evidence more efficiently.
C. Odegard (Texas Instruments. USA), Andy Burnett (Texas Instruments. USA), J. Tang (JIACO Instruments. Delft, The Netherlands), J. Wang (JIACO Instruments. Delft, The Netherlands).
