Failure Analyisis on very small components?

[Raquel]

Hello All;

I akready worked in a company which assemble SAW devices, however since the size of the components we already assembly are diminishing considerably we are looking for some methods in order to improve our Failure Analysis, this also implies new techniques or equipment. Please let me know how do you perform your Failure Analysis?

Any help will be appreciated.

 

[CarolX]

I akready worked in a company which assemble SAW devices,

Hi Raquel.....I am not familiar with this term..what is a SAW device?

 

[Al Rosen]

Hi Raquel.....I am not familiar with this term..what is a SAW device?

Surface Accoustic Wave.

 

[Mike Smith]

We do our failure analysis in this way. After analysis, pareto charts are developed which shows the failure modes and amount of failures of each individual type of failure. We then determine what the components are failing for the most. We then develop improvement projects for the type of failures we are seeing the most often. Hopefully after we improve this, we then attack the next most common failure mode. Hopefully, a trend develops showing less failures after a period of time.

Hope this helps.

 

[Raquel]

Maybe some other clarification at this time... Since I forgot to mention that we perform the electrical test on the parts too, we got some devices that fail because of degraded response or even no response at all so we need to perform failure analysis on some of those failures in order to find the root causes to try to avoid them however since as I mentioned before the devices turns to be smaller than they used to be the failure Analysis turns very hard and I think we have no the right tools right now so I need some help in order to try to address what kind of tools, equipment (we just buy a new X-Ray system) and techniques some IC developers and manufacturers as some of you use to make this job.

 

[Mike Smith]

Ahh!!! The machines we are currently using for failure analysis are high power microscopes and x-ray machines. We are currently investigating the use of thermal imaging. This seems to hold a lot of promise and identifies the trouble spots in the IC's or electronic circuitry for you. The only thing you have to do then is figure out why the circuitry failed. Some one else may be able to help you further.