Integrated circuits make up some of the most complicated devices ever known to man. It's doubtful whether any single person even knows everything about how a given chip operates down to the physics behind every system. So many layers make up a typical chip that the immensity can overwhelm a mind. Think about how complicated it must be therefore to isolate and detect an error in a given chip. One doesn't know at which layer the problem lies, not just literally (for a chip can have many layers), but also figuratively - we don't know which system houses the flaw. Is it the electronics, the composition of the materials of the chip, the manufacture, or the structural integrity of the chip itself? A semiconductor test has to take into consideration this and many other issues before it's able to arrive at the root of the problem, Let's take a look at some of the systems within a chip and see how each test caters to a different part of the whole.

Various Semiconductor Tests

A failure analysis lab test holds an arsenal of techniques which cater to finding out what exactly is the cause of a malfunctioning seintegrated circuit. Some of these techniques preserve the chip for further testing and are therefore applied before others. They're called Non Destructive Tests or (NDTs). If possible, we'd like to keep a chip in tact not just because we can test it further, but because we can use it as a reference point for future analysis. Chips don't fail very often and having one at hand which is representative of a particular type of flaw can be quite useful.

An example of an NDT is spectrographic testing. Companies use this to find out whether there are any impurities in the material causing it to deviate from expected results. We even use this on healthy chips to help pass ROHS certifications meant to control the use of hazardous substances in chip manufacture.

Other tests involve isolating flaws in the electronic systems. These can be frustrating to discover and it requires quite a lot of skill in reaching the root of the problem. Thermal graphs give us a starting point where we can begin the search.

There are many other semiconductor test scenarios which can occur in a lab and they all rely on detecting errors in some system or the other. With advances in semi conductor technologies and increases in complexity, the art of failure analysis is set to become even more critical in the future.

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