Researchers from Advanced Micro Devices and TeraView Ltd. presented a discussion of an electro optical terahertz pulse reflectometry method for short fault localization in advanced IC packages at the ASM International ISTFA 2019 conference in Portland, Oregon.
They demonstrated how electro optical terahertz pulse reflectometry (EOTPR) can be used in conjunction with a new one-dimensional lump circuit simulation software to quickly and non-destructively isolate faults in advanced IC packages. In the case studies presented, short failures were accurately located in a series of advanced IC packages.
High accuracy, rapid localization of short failures in advanced IC packages is an increasingly challenging issue due to the decreasing feature dimensions present in state-of-the-art packages and their corresponding increased complexity. In recent years, EOTPR has become an essential tool in fault analysis labs in the semiconductor industry, due to its ability to nondestructively detect and localize faults in a wide range of device architectures, its rapid measurement time (<5 minutes), and its fault localization accuracy of better than 10 µm.
However, the localization of short faults in measured EOTPR waveforms can be challenging, due to the signal being a sum of the short current path and the good current path. Here, we demonstrate how a newly released analysis application, EOTPR QuickSim, can overcome these challenges and enable short fault localization with high accuracy.
Title: Non-Destructive Short Fault Localization in Advanced IC Packages Using Electro Optical Terahertz Pulse Reflectometry
B. Zee, W. Qiu, Device Analysis Laboratory, Advanced Micro Devices; J. Alton, T. White, M. Igarashi, D. Sullivan, TeraView Limited, Cambridge, England
