EDFAS Online Community

The EDFAS Education Subcommittee strives for the development and delivery of educational products to the EDFAS membership. Keeping with its strategic focus on reaching a broader audience, including facilitating Q&A and educational exchanges on the ASM Connect platform, the Subcommittee presents short format presentations on selected FA topics. These presentations are available on ASM Connect and highlighted in EDFA Magazine.

We present the tutorial:

Advanced Physical Sample Preparation for Failure Analysis

Jim Colvin
CEO
FA Instruments, Inc.

Jim Colvin discusses the microelectronics industry’s key applications that require physical sample preparation. With the never-ending technological development of semiconductor devices and their attendant packaging styles along with the optical, electronic and beam-based tools and techniques developed to test and assure them – the result is that sample preparation has never been more important… and less understood!

With four decades of practical experience in Lab Management and machine design, Colvin takes a hands-on approach to explaining the main sample preparation disciplines – with numerous real-world examples of successful results – along with descriptions of pitfalls and techniques to avoid them throughout each process step.

Though theory dictates and drives the need, what is becoming ever more crucial is the training required to empower recent electronic engineering graduates to become proficient in physical materials science-related disciplines. 

Backside decapsulation, thinning and polishing are described in detail for standard components – for producing optimized samples for photon-emission microscopy and on down to single-digit remaining silicon requirements for the latest optical techniques.

Stacked die profiling and more esoteric applications for in-situ probing, as part of the processing operation round out the tutorial.