The need to miniaturize in the electronics industry is driving smaller form factors, and resulting in complex packaging innovations such as structures with multiple devices stacked inside a three dimensional package. These structures present a challenge for non-destructive fault isolation. Two such modules recently exhibited failures on the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Solar Dynamic Observatory (SDO) during board-level testing. Each module consisted of eight vertically-stacked mini-boards, each mini-board with a single EEPROM microcircuit and capacitor, and connected by external gold metallization to module pins. Both failed modules exhibited low-resistance shorts between multiple pins. The orthogonal structure of the module prompted the use of magnetic current imaging (MCI) in three planes in order to construct an internal three-dimensional current path for each of the failed modules. Magnetic current imaging is able to “look through” non-magnetic, or de-gaussed packaging materials, allowing global imaging without physical deprocessing of the stacked EEPROM modules, in order to construct the internal current path and localize defects. To our knowledge, this is the first time that this has been done. Following global isolation of the defects, two types of magnetic sensors were used in parallel with limited deprocessing in order to more precisely characterize suspect failure locations before actually physically exposing the defects. This paper will show the process for using magnetic current imaging with both SQUID and magnetoresistive (GMR) sensors to isolate defects in two stacked EEPROM packages along with the final physical analysis of the defects. The failure analysis found that these devices were damaged by external heat, possibly during oven pre-conditioning or hot air soldering onto the board. The manufacturer, 3-D Plus, was not implicated in the failure.
As integrated circuit packages become more complicated, the localization of defects becomes correspondingly more difficult. One particularly difficult class of defects to localize is high resistance (HR) defects. These defects include cracked traces, delaminated vias, C4 non-wet defects, PTH cracks, and any other package or interconnect structure that results in a signal line resistance change that exceeds the specification of the device. These defects can result in devices that do not run at full speed, are not reliable in the field, or simply do not work at all. The main approach for localizing these defects today is time domain reflectometry (TDR) [1]. TDR sends a short electrical pulse into the device and monitors the time to receive reflections. These reflections can correspond to shorts, opens, bends in a wire, normal interfaces between devices, or high resistance defects. Ultimately anything that produces an electrical impedance change will produce a TDR response. These signals are compared to a good part and require time consuming layer-by-layer deprocessing and comparison to a standard part. When complete, the localization is typically at best to within 200 microns. A new approach to isolating high resistance defects has been recently developed using current imaging. In recent years, current imaging through magnetic field detection has become a main-stream approach for short localization in the package [2] and is also heavily utilized for die level applications [3]. This core technology has been applied to the localization of high resistance defects. This paper will describe the approach, and give examples of test samples as well as results from actual yield failures.
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