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 has been inviting ISTFA tutorial speakers and others to present short format presentations on selected FA topics.

The EDFAS Education Subcommittee highlights this tutorial on Near-field Terahertz Imaging by Daniel Johnson, Navid Asadi, and Chengjie (Peter) Xi.

The video explores the different possibilities of utilizing a THz-TDS system to enhance hardware assurance. THz-TDS can effectively detect defects and voids underneath the polymer material. This is because the THz is sensitive to reflective index change which is caused by the material difference between the air and polymer. The reflective index difference can also exist within the same polymer material due to the internal stress, aging, deformation, and the degree of crystallinity of the polymer which can be detected by THz-TDS. Also, THz-TDS is very sensitive to moisture which has been used to quantitatively detect water content level. The moisture concentration feature is also highly valuable for detecting IC packaging issues and ensuring hardware assurance. Also, THz-TDS is able to simultaneously analyzes phase and amplitude information which is helpful to non-destructively capture the volumetric information of IC packaging. Based on different system setup, these methods can have different resolutions ranging from micrometer to centimeter and applied in various domains. Image enhancement methods will be introduced to optimize these methods for hardware assurance capabilities. THz-based 'chipless' RFID technology has been developed to facilitate the tracking and tracing of devices throughout the supply chain. In THz-ID, various materials with distinct dielectric constants are combined to create a unique signal code at THz frequencies. This innovative approach not only enables effective device identification but also contributes to hardware assurance by enhancing security and authentication measures.