Assessing Compatibility of Advanced IC Packages to X-ray Based Physical Inspection

This article describes a proposed novel metric to furnish chip designers with a prognostic tool for x-ray imaging in the pre-silicon stage. This metric is fashioned to provide designers with a concrete measure of how visible the fine-pitched features of their designs are under x-ray inspection. It utilizes a combination of x-ray image data collection, analysis, and simulations to evaluate different design elements.