Advanced Fault Isolation and Failure Analysis Techniques for Future Package Technologies

Abstract

As next-generation package technologies become more complex, the isolation of defects and their failure analysis has became more challenging. The complexity of newgeneration packages, driven by Moore’s Law, include a greater number of components allocated to smaller form factors, thus creating defects that are difficult to isolate and characterize, such as metal migration, dendrite growth, microcracks, wirebond microfractures, plane-toplane shorting, high-resistance, defects in multistacked dice, via delamination, and bump bridging. A continued effort has been made to close these technical gaps in analytical tools and techniques. By guiding and codeveloping next-generation analytical tools, we have been able to successfully identify failure modes and root causes to rapidly advance unique and new solutions at Intel in current package technologies. In this paper we discuss how these tools are being used in the failure analysis flow, as well as the technical gaps that have to be addressed in order to meet the fault isolation and failure analysis challenges of next-generation package technologies.