Scanning acoustic microscopy covering a wide temperature range: SAM(T)

The reliability of plastic encapsulated microchips is strongly influenced by temperature. Scanning Acoustic Microscopy (SAM) is established as an indispensable non-destructive analytical tool to evaluate mechanical failures such as cracks or delaminations imposed by reliability tests within electronic components. They are investigated by SAM at room temperature after a treatment by thermal stress. Thus, the very failure mechanisms due to the thermal effects remain in dark. In this work we present for the first time the growth and change of delaminations in integrated circuit devices under thermal stress from -60degreesC to 150degreesC in a real temperature manner. For this SAM(T) was established, a SAM with the particular feature to change the temperature of the object and to record its changes online. This kind of results may be used as valuable input for future work on virtual reliability testing for microelectronics.