edfas.org ELECTRONIC DEVICE FAILURE ANALYSIS | VOLUME 25 NO. 2 44 GUEST COLUMNIST of periodic table elements are in- corporated into the IC fabrica- tion process. To quote Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger: “I like to say, Moore’s law ain’t dead until the periodic table is exhausted.” Fabs made use of about 10 elements up until 25 years ago; it’s about 30 today, most introduced in the last 10 to 15 years (Fig. 1). It’s not just the number of periodic table elements but also the compounds containing these elements that have exploded. Fabs use six or more types of carbon, nine types of silicon nitrides, 10 types of silicon oxides, and so on. This explosive growth in the number of elements and compounds now used in fabrication requires precise compositional process control, and for FA, atomic-level resolution and identification of species in a 3D volume. By some accounts, more than half of defects today are non-visual (not visible in traditional imaging This is part of a series of reports on the findings to date of the EDFAS FA Roadmap Councils. The FA Future Roadmap Council (FAFRC) is concerned with identifying the longer term needs of the FA community. There is a continuous effort to improve FA tools but with every new node introduced, the requirements are increased, resulting in a seemingly never-ending cycle of advancements. There are gaps in the FAFRC roadmap that do not have a solution identified at this time, but they may be bridged with advancements of existing technologies or new technologies not currently serving the FA market. Shorter term roadmaps are also being published by other FA Roadmap Councils. The FAFRC roadmap has six common elements between logic devices, memory devices, and packaging: (1) increased complexity due to expansion into the third dimension (3D); (2) introduction of new materials; (3) continued but slower dimensional scaling; (4) chip-package co-design necessary to realize performance benefits; (5) automation, and (6) machine learning/ artificial intelligence (AI). EXPANSION IN THE THIRD DIMENSION You can think of the evolution of cities as real estate became scarce and population density increased: building height increased and skyscrapers are now common. Similarly with ICs, in addition to building up into the third dimension, improvements continue in the bottleneck at street level: transistor performance. Di- mensional scaling alone is no longer following Moore’s Law but materials engineering has come to the rescue as a growing number THE EDFAS FA TECHNOLOGY ROADMAP— FA FUTURE ROADMAP Nicholas Antoniou, PrimeNano Inc. nicholas@primenanoinc.com Brendan Foran, The Aerospace Corp. brendan.foran@aero.org Antoniou Foran Fig. 1 Elements used in the fabrication of mainstream semiconductors; past, present, and future.
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