Toward In-House 3D Nanoscale X-Ray Tomography of Integrated Circuits for Quality Control and Hardware Security at Speed of Need

Le résumé fourni par la source

As the scale and complexity of integrated circuits (ICs) and advanced packaging grow larger while the individual features on a computer chip grow smaller, a clear need for novel metrology tools emerges. X-ray computed tomography (xCT) has proven to be an effective imaging approach in medicine, manufacturing, and the semiconductor industry, with state-of-the-art measurements capable of nondestructively producing a 3D reconstruction of ICs and resolving features as small as 10 nm buried deep within a chip. However, achieving these resolutions requires access to synchrotron radiation, which is not practical for many quality control and national security needs. Here, we present an update on our efforts to deliver a turnkey in-house xCT tool for producing 3D reconstructions of ICs at sufficient spatial resolution and imaging speeds to be useful to semiconductor failure analysis labs and for screening chips for hardware trojans. We explore the tradeoffs between using a NIST-developed 240-pixel transition-edge sensor (TES) spectrometer with excellent energy resolution that enables element-specific reconstruction and a$\mathbf{4}$-megapixel commercial hybrid photon counting (HPC) detector, which offers superior collection efficiency and measurement speeds at the cost of energy resolution. We review reconstruction results of an IC fabricated at the 130 nm node collected with a TES spectroscopic detector and discuss subsequent measurements performed with a commercial x-ray detector, which imaged the same circuitry 200 times faster than the TES array and is expected to lead to a full 3D reconstruction in the near future. Finally, we address artifacts of energy thresholding with a polychromatic source with the goal of preserving some degree of elemental sensitivity while achieving spatial resolutions and imaging speeds sufficient to make the tool useful in semiconductor manufacturing and hardware security.

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