November_EDFA_Digital

edfas.org ELECTRONIC DEVICE FAILURE ANALYSIS | VOLUME 21 NO. 4 60 GUEST COLUMNIST A DEDICATED SYNCHROTRON BEAMLINE SUITE FOR ENHANCED VALIDATION OF INTEGRATED CIRCUITS E.L. Principe, Synchrotron Research Inc., Melbourne Beach, Florida eprincipe@synchres.com INTRODUCTION In the August 2019 issue of EDFA magazine, I and my team members outlined the present state of the art in large area delayering of integrated circuits (ICs), with forward looking prospects for improvements in terms of both hardware and software. [1] As a follow up, this guest column describes the economic and technical benefits of developing a dedicated intergovernmental synchrotron- based tool suite for advanced, high throughput char- acterization and deprocessing of ICs. This initiative will leveragemore than $1 billion in infrastructure investment in one of the world’s newest and brightest synchrotron facilities: National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II) at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York. The facility would combine unique synchrotron capabili- ties with experienced and established technical staff in a manner that cannot be matched by most government or private labs around the world. In the mission to ensure hardware security and combat counterfeit fraud, this ini- tiativewill establisha foundationuponwhich state-of-the- art hardware security may be maintained and advanced without the threat of rapid obsolescence due to the pace of advancing IC technology. Synchrotrons are, in brief, facilities that provide a source of extremely high brightness, tunable electromag- netic radiation from hard x-ray energies down to infrared radiation for the purpose of materials characterization, materials processing, and fundamental studies. Both the source brightness and the tunability of the source are critical and unique properties of a synchrotron. My first experience with synchrotron-based analytical tools was in 1997 when I was a member of the x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) staff at Charles Evans & Associates, now Evans Analytical Group. I was assigned the task of evaluating the use of the micro-XPS endstation at the Advanced Light Source at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as a commercial business. At that time, the lack of automation and poor throughput of the endsta- tions, combined with the programmatic downtime of the synchrotron facilities, made that venture untenable. Today the situation is far different in a modern third generation synchrotron. Amodernbeamline experimental endstation may integrate a very high degree of automa- tion with a very stable bright light source to provide orders of magnitude higher efficiency, resolution, and sensitivity than can be achieved with laboratory equip- ment. However, there still remain barriers to timely access to these powerful facilities, even for other government agencies. Equally important, there is a lack of specialized experimental endstations designed to interrogate large area IC devices. In the next few paragraphs, those chal- lenges will be addressed and the outline of a dedicated facility will be proposed. CHALLENGES Timely access is critical for this initiative and is one reason why a dedicated facility with intergovernmental agency access is vital. Traditionally, academicsmay apply for beamline time through user proposals, which typically have a six-month lead time and a duration of oneweek for specific experiments. For industry, the preferred option is to engage a partner beamline in a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA). At NSLS-II, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Synchrotron Science Group operates a suite of three partner beamlines at NSLS-II with a dedicated staff of 10 highly experienced scientists. [2] A CRADA allows indus- try partners to engage with the NIST staff with timely access to focused problems, which falls squarely within the NIST mission statement to enhance industrial com- petitiveness. Those interested in further informationmay reach out to Ron Jones, the lead for synchrotron strate- gic partnerships. [3]