Topography and deformation measurement under thermomechanical stress [IC packaging]

Increases in interconnection level and power density lead to growing reliability problems in microelectronic packages. Assembly processes, materials selection and package design have to be continuously re-arranged. Nondestructive, volume imaging techniques such as X-ray radiography or scanning acoustic microscopy provide reliable information about interfaces, and material homogeneity and density. Anyway, no existing investigation technique allows us to quantify in-situ stress state, and to detect failure mechanism initiation through a dynamic measurement simultaneous to the process. It is assumed that damaging constraints in IC critical zones inevitably lead to external measurable deformations. Insidix has developed an investigation tool including high heating and cooling rate static furnace and dynamic measurement of 3D deformation of surfaces. It has been shown that deformation and topography maps on different type of assemblies could be accurately realized through this method, and that it could provide reliable deformation films during fast temperature profiles.