SBIR Phase II: Novel Semiconductor Warpage Measurement Device

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.