SBIR-STTR Award

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to provide a novel approach to evaluate the reliability of IC chips and electronic devices. Forced by the shrinking size and miniaturization of electronic component and devices, products are being designed with little margin regarding reliability and performance, and the reliability issue has been a great challenge. Reliability must be evaluated to estimate its real field life span, and weak link must be assessed to identify the potential failure risk. This novel approach could indicate the potential design risk through enhanced measurement input for full field deformation and provide better understanding of the interaction of different materials due to coefficient of thermal expansion miss match at elevated temperature. This innovation will provide detailed information to identify potential failure risk and improve design, and therefore reduce immature failure of electronic component and devices, creating a strong value proposition for our customers. The proposed project will develop a measurement approach to achieve simultaneous measurements of warpage, coefficient of thermal expansion and strain on semiconductor devises. Warpage and coefficient of thermal expansion measurement above glass transition temperature are poorly measured due to the glassy state of materials. This project will develop an approach for accurate measurement using a novel image correlation technology through different media with changing indexes of refraction. This is a critical step for measurement of IC chip warpage and coefficient of thermal expansion through a glass viewing window at elevated temperatures. Experiments are proposed to validate the methodology in the application of high temperature warpage and material coefficient of thermal expansion measurement. The goal of this project is to improve warpage measurement resolution by 5 times, and solve material coefficient of thermal expansion measurement issue above glass transition, and realize warpage, coefficient of thermal expansion and strain measurement at the same time.

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project is the enablement of advanced integration of thinner, more flexible and heterogeneous semiconductor devices. It will accelerate the adoption of next generation integrated circuit chips and bring significant benefit to society through the development of high performance electronics. Driven by portable devices in the mobile internet industry and the cost reduction requirements in Internet of Things (IOT), integrated circuit chips are becoming thinner and more flexible, whereas the working environments expose them to more extreme conditions. This trend creates increasing challenges and reducing reliability due to their higher inclination to failure. This proposed novel opto-mechanical system is able to identify early indications of potential problems. It can accelerate the recent industrial trends moving toward IOT and autonomous vehicle by significantly reducing development cycle time and engineering labor. These emerging industrial trends have induced many mechanical reliability issues, and are making it difficult to meet required quality and reliability of semiconductor devices. Many of these issues could be anticipated in integrated circuit design and on production lines with an instrument capable of measuring the sensitivity at the micron level. The objective of this proposed project is to develop a system for noncontact detection of premature failure. An imaging approach and stereo cameras are used to measure and track the sample. The anticipated result is to develop an instrument with ten-fold performance improvement over instruments currently available.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.