Automatic final inspection: an important nonexpensive control to guarantee long-term reliability

摘要

After final electrical tests of microchips, an additional visual inspection is performed to guarantee their long term reliability. This step is time consuming and highly labor intensive. To reduce costs, and to improve at the same time the defect density monitoring using a higher sampling rate, the final visual inspection performed manually by operators, is replaced by an automatic inspection. This paper illustrates how the high sampling rate of a automatic final inspection may be used for better defect monitoring through final insulator layers, monitoring underlying metal layers as well.