Using High Speed Camera Metrology in Support of Failure Analysis and Product Development

Typical failure analyses metrologies for dynamic failures are cross-sections, microscopy, dye-and-pull, optical and SEM. Using these traditional metrologies to find root cause for a dynamic event can be very time consuming and often the results cannot point directly to the root cause itself. The standard approach is to work backward to reconstruct the “event” that caused or initiated the failure. Often the root cause is not immediately obvious and iterative testing to identify the true root cause is costly in time, materials and resources. At Intel we have been using high speed imaging and motion analysis (HSIMA) to identify the failure at the point of initiation. Using the point of initiation concept with reconstructive modeling allows a design team to identify potential initiating sources and better match and implement corrective action. HSIMS has proven to decreases development time, minimized product design cycle and increases market opportunities by decreasing cycle times to root cause of failures.