One of the activities at ASMAC is determining how and why materials, components and process fail. Hardware failures are always costly and frustrating and ASMAC can help in solving the problems as follows
- Verify the material composition to check if defects in material contributed to failure.
- Verify the material in between each process stage to check if improper processing contributed to the failure.
- Gathering information from customers and the experiment data, we may able to determine the mode of failure, the cause of failure and pin-point the exact location of failure initiation.
Possible Causes of Failures
- Material Defects
- Processing Defects
- Environment Effects
- Improper Operation
- Improper Processing
- Poor Design
Possible Failure Modes
- Brittle / Ductile Overload
- Chemical Reaction
- Impact
- Thermal Fatigue
- Corrosion Fatigue
Surface detection devices such as
- SEM (scanning electron microscope)/ EDS (Energy Dispersive Spectroscopy)
- XPS (X-ray Photo-electron Spectroscopy )
- AES (Auger Electron Spectroscopy)
- FT-IR
- TOF-SIMS
- AFM
- XRF
- XRD
are used to observe morphology of the material surface, elemental identification and molecular information checking.
Physical Properties detection devices such as
- Wetting Balance (ability on wetting)
- Universal Mechanical Tester (tensile/compressive stress and strain checking)
Examples
A. Voiding in wafer bumping
Analysis Technique: Cross-sectioning + Optical Microscope
Figure 6 Optical image of the cross-sectioned wafer bump without void (Objective: 50x)
Figure 7 Optical image of the cross-sectioned wafer bump with void (Objective: 50x)
B. Black Pad in PWB with ENIG finishing
Analysis Technique: Cross-sectioning + SEM
Figure 8 SEM image of the black pad surface (Mag: 15,000x)
Figure 9 SEM image of the cross-sectioned black pad showing corrosion in the EN layer (Mag: 20,000x)
C. “Red” pad in PWB with OSP finishing
Analysis Technique: SEM
Figure 10 SEM image of the normal pad showing presence of OSP coating (Mag.: 100x)
Figure 11 SEM image of the red pad showing absence of OSP coating (Mag.: 100x)
|
