The goal of this work was to automate the crack detection of pads on a wafer piece. This process allows the engineer to check a huge number of pads for cracks to obtain a meaningful statistical result of the Pad-Over-Active-Areas (POAA) stability, which is a typical task in the failure analysis laboratories. It is possible that cracks in POAA appear during the electrical test or the bonding process. The current analysis process is very time consuming as thousands of pads have to be inspected for cracks by an engineer. The process starts with the chemical preparation of a wafer piece to make the crack below the pad visible. After that, the engineer examines each pad individually through the optical microscope for cracks. For the automation of this process a new workflow had to be developed and is described in this work. Moreover, it comprises the automation of a light microscope as well as an automated image evaluation based on a neural network.

GHz-SAM using toneburst transducers is a method currently lacking the possibility to measure warped samples easily because large parts of such samples are out of focus due to the limited depth of focus of these types of transducers. This paper shows an approach to use the already established HiSA (High Speed Axis) method to overcome this disadvantage. Therefore warpage of the sample is measured by a white-light interferometer. The detected bow is parametrized and submitted in the control electronics of the HiSA. With this data the HiSA is enabled to keep the distance between sample and transducer precisely constant. This allows eliminating the influence of the warpage on the performance of this method and therefore highly increases the image quality.

Microcalorimeter based energy dispersive X-ray analysis (EDS) combines in a revolutionary way resolution of wavelength dispersive spectroscopy (WDS) with the ease of use of conventional EDS. The necessary operating temperatures (~100mK) for the superconducting sensor are supplied by a mechanical, maintenance free and fully automated cooling system, allowing the integration of the system not only in a traditional F/A environment, but also as an inline (cleanroom) installation. Typical examples of material analysis in everyday F/A work show that the detector exhibits an energy resolution of about 10 eV. With this performance, the solution of well known overlap problems existing for element combinations commonly used in semiconductor technology (peak separation of Ti/N, Ta/Si, W/Si) is possible. Structures of small volume can be investigated successfully, since the tool is optimized for work in the low energy range. The case of a failing TiN-layer showed that μcalorimeter EDS allows also thin film analysis: oxide layers with a thickness difference of a few nm can be distinguished; subsequent depth-profiling with Auger electron spectroscopy confirmed the results.