2010 Photo Contest Winners

Congratulations to the 2010 winners!
 Category I: Color Images
1st Place:

Thomas Zirilli
Freescale Semiconducteurs France SAS

That optical picture from the Backside of the Silicon die gives a nice “window view” on the logic circuitry. A chemical deprocessing allowed that intermediate step in the Physical characterization process.

2nd Place:


Al Merino, Rebecca Burgin
ON Semiconductor

Which road should I take?

Wrights Etch on Silicon
3rd Place: 


Tom Lesniewski, Nicholas Saintarbor,
Ben Reed
Northrop Grumman Corp

Top down photo of brush pin connector contact with foreign material on the tip.  The blue/green color of the foreign material was an indicator of copper alloy corrosion byproducts.

 Category II: Black and White Images

1st Place:

Chistophe DeNardi, THALES ISS and
Philippe Perdu, CNES

A star is born. Heavy ion induced damage in a capacitor of an operational amplifier: the ionization path triggered a short circuit in the capacitor. The very short and intense discharge caused this submicron star shape underlined after localization and delayering at capacitance oxide level by secondary electrons imaging.

2nd Place: 

Morgan Cason, Davide Caccialanza
STMicroelectronics

Aways coke! FIB cross section of a damaged
power DMOS cell. The drain contact
is pushed into the silicon by an
Electrical Overstress event occurred
at the device output. Chemical
decoration evidences the current path from
the drain side to the substrate, with no
involvement of gate and source connectors.

3rd Place:

Kevin Polito
Hi-Rel Laboratories

S.E.M Micrograph of a large whisker extruding from beneath a die bond on a active component.  A potential conductive foreign particle able to bridge non-common elements if it were to break loose.  Note additional smaller whiskers beginning to extrude from the bond pad metallization.
 Category III: False Color Images

1st Place:

Julien Goxe
Freescale Semiconducteurs France SAS

This is a SEM picture of a  cross sectionned electronic component presenting a metallic particle embedded in the mold compound. It was a latent defect creating a leakage between two adjacent bond wires. The Backscattered Electron image with pseudo color make the different particle phases clearly visible.

2nd Place:

Herve Deslandes, Ph.D.
DCG Systems

FA Instruments, San Jose, California

NVIDIA graphics device. Trying to detect
a few mOhms short inside the device requires
the use of very low resistance wires, and
they are the ones lighting up while doing
real time lock in thermography.

3rd Place:

Carl Wintgens
UBM TechInsights

3D visualization of the varying dopant concentration within deep P-type isolation structures of a Power MOSFET.
The image was acquired by Scanning Capacitance Microscopy (SCM).