A Profile of a Quality Network Department
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Failure Analysis Lab team members work two shifts in their relentless quest to solve failures.
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A 24-member staff, part of the Quality Network perform National´s high-tech detective work. They poke, prod, cut, inspect, and test failed chips in an attempt to find out what went wrong.
Engineers and lab technicians spend hours fine-tuning electron microscopes and X ray machines looking for clues at the atomic level. It´s equipment that sees the integrated circuit – invisible to the naked eye – in stunning detail.
We´re introduced to a sublime world of metal traces as thin as 1,800 atoms (.18 micron; an atom is about 1/10 billionth of a meter wide). Objects smaller than a human cell, smaller than a bacterium, even smaller than a virus, take on a kind of three-dimensional normalcy, as though they might be visible if only our eyes could see better.
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Our Director of Failure Analysis started with National in 1979.
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Without these tools, all efforts to find IC failures would be doomed. The tools don't come cheap. An electron microscope or a focused ion beam machine can cost $1 million, or more. While the cost is high, consider what´s at stake: Failed parts can cripple a business and damage National's reputation.
With millions of dollars in revenue at risk, there's pressure to find what caused a failure as quickly as possible.
Since reorganizing in 1997, the group has improved its response time to the customer from more than 60 days to about 17 days. Its success rate for determining the cause of a failure is better than 90 percent. We measure our performance, and the performance of our engineers, by how quickly we respond and our success rate. Ironically, a defective part the size of a grain of sand can trigger hundreds of hours of costly investigation.
Each advancement in process technology ripples through to the Failure Analysis lab. New equipment is needed to see the increasingly smaller IC geometries. Fortunately, electron microscope technology is keeping up, with the recent announcement of a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) that can "see" at the sub-atomic level.
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The Failure Analysis Lab´s Jeol JSM6700 field emission electron microscope can see images down to 2.2 nanometers, or 2.2 billionths of a meter.
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As with the crime detective, the failure analysis engineer can expect a different problem with each new case. No matter the failure cause – customer or National – "We stand behind the quality of our products. If a customer faces any problem due to our parts, we work relentlessly until the root cause of the problem is identified."
Meanwhile, as most Santa Clara employees head home for the day, National's Failure Analysis Labs located in the basement of building D may carry on around the clock. Engineers probe, test, and analyze with their million-dollar machines, as they try to solve some of the most perplexing problems in the semiconductor industry.
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