3D InCites Podcast
3D InCites Podcast
Revolutionizing Semiconductor Quality: The Dynamic Planar CT Advantage
Andrew Mathers, Principal Product Line Manager at Nordson Test and Inspection, discusses the revolutionary advancements in 3D x-ray inspection technology and how they're improving semiconductor manufacturing quality.
• X-ray inspection requires high resolution, speed, and cost-effectiveness to drive better product quality
• Traditional 2D radiographic imaging is being replaced by 3D imaging for more stringent manufacturing requirements
• Planar CT imaging suffers from artifacts when inspecting flat electronic components like circuit boards and wafers
• Dynamic Planar CT takes more images from different angles with a wider field of view, reducing artifacts
• New technology operates twice as fast as traditional methods while reducing x-ray dose to sensitive components
• Automated inspection systems integrate directly into manufacturing lines with no human interaction required
• Common applications include detecting voids in ball grid arrays and micro bumps in flip chip devices
• The technology supports Quality 4.0 initiatives by providing feedback to improve manufacturing processes
• Nordson's systems are in use worldwide with an install base exceeding 2000 automated x-ray inspection systems
Learn more about Dynamic Planar CT and Nordson's x-ray inspection solutions at nordson.com or on their YouTube channel.
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This episode of the 3D Insights podcast is sponsored by Nordsen Test and Inspection. Leaders in acoustic, optical and x-ray inspection and metrology systems for the semiconductor and SMT manufacturing markets. Nordsen's next-generation 3D x-ray inspection software, dynamic Planar CT, reveals incredible details for Nordsen's zero-defect strategy. Nordsen's advanced software is two times faster than planar CT, with enhanced detail quality, superior reconstruction and a larger field of view for increased coverage and shorter cycle times all to improve yields, processes and productivity. Learn more at Nordsoncom. Hi there, I'm Francoise von Trapp, and this is the 3D Insights Podcast. Hi everyone, in this week's episode of the 3D Insights Podcast we're continuing a deep dive into the importance of 100% inspection in the semiconductor manufacturing environment, and this time we're going to focus on advancements in x-ray inspection and specifically for 3D imaging. So I am speaking with Andrew Mathers of Nord's Intestine Inspection to learn about what's going on in this area and pick his brain on his knowledge. So welcome to the podcast, andrew.
Andrew Mathers :Thank you so much for having me on.
Françoise von Trapp :Before we dive in. I understand you're new to the company at Nordson. Can you tell me a little bit about yourself and the role that you've taken there?
Andrew Mathers :Sure, I joined Nordson about six months ago as a principal product line manager for their automated x-ray inspection product line and my background is really in x-ray. I've been in the x-ray world for about 10 years now, as starting out as a postdoctoral, postgraduate at university using x-ray to look at plants, to look at them in terms of their root development underground and their leaf development above ground, and then moved heavily into the industry side and have been in the industry for about eight years working for different x-ray system manufacturers and recently joined Nordson to look at electronics.
Françoise von Trapp :So you're bringing this really varied background in. Are you finding the needs of electronic inspection a lot different than the other areas that you've studied?
Andrew Mathers :No, I don't think so. I think there's a commonality between what a lot of customers want from x-ray inspection. They want high resolution, so they need to be able to see very, very small things down to the micron level. They obviously want it to be done quickly, they want it to be cost effective and, most of all, they want it to help drive better products or better understanding of what they're imaging their imaging, and that we know is becoming very important in this industry, as the devices that we're inspecting are getting more and more complex and therefore more and more.
Françoise von Trapp :I don't want to say valuable, but when you capture the defects can mean the difference down the road of having to start from scratch or being able to repair something and the loss there right.
Andrew Mathers :Absolutely, and I think this brings us purely around to 3D imaging, because in the past many of our customers, certainly many people operating in this space, have historically relied on 2D radiographic imaging for inspection. As manufacturing requirements become ever more stringent and the quality and the reliability of devices has to continue to increase to meet the demands from the suppliers, from the end customers and the market in general, 3d imaging, driving that higher performance, inspection, that better resolution, better quality, is becoming a much, much more common requirement to support these efforts.
Françoise von Trapp :So how long has 3D imaging been an option in the electronic space then?
Andrew Mathers :3D imaging has been around for a while in electronics imaging. However, the quality of it has always been something that's quite difficult to achieve. One of the problems with this style of imaging is you're looking at a planar object, you're looking at something that's typically very flat, like a semiconductor wafer or a printed circuit board, and to image these objects you use planar scanning, or laminography as it's also known, and this can suffer from lots of imaging artifacts, which are features or distortions that are present in your images that aren't truly present in reality in the sample, for example, in electronic samples. These make it very, very difficult to clearly visualize between the different layers and the devices. However, the 3D imaging side of things allows us to very, very clearly discriminate between these layers and see things in clear detail, which is incredibly valuable.
Françoise von Trapp :Okay. So I want to step back just one minute because I want to make a clear distinction when you're talking about planar, you're talking about using planar images to create a 3D image versus planar for a 2D image.
Andrew Mathers :So when I say planar, I mean using planar CT, which is designed for flat samples. Ok, so you are building a 3D volume of your images at the end, but because of the nature of the sample being so flat and the way that you have to rotate around it to get that computed tomography approach, it tends to be quite difficult to avoid having quite nasty artifacts in the image.
Françoise von Trapp :Okay, and the artifacts aren't actually on the sample that you're using. These are actually introduced because of the imaging process.
Andrew Mathers :Absolutely. It's generated features or distortions that are present in the image that aren't there in reality in the sample. But you're quite right, they come from the imaging approach that you're using, but it is the best imaging approach for these planar samples.
Françoise von Trapp :So with laminography they're taking different slices of images and then putting them together using software.
Andrew Mathers :So laminography, you tend to have a static sample and you rotate your source and detector, or just your detector, in a motion around the point that you're inspecting your region of interest within the sample and you still reconstruct and build up a 3D volume. However, you tend to inspect this in slices in the Z-axis. So you're looking top down. You have very good clarity in those slices, but once you look at a vertical slice and you look at it from side on, you tend to see quite bad artifacts that disrupt the data.
Françoise von Trapp :So for a 3D x-ray, what are we getting as the output?
Andrew Mathers :You're getting data which is non-destructively looking at the structure of something, so you won't just get surface detail. Yes, indeed, you're getting the surface externally and internal surfaces and anything in between.
Françoise von Trapp :Okay, and the image that's output is a 3D image.
Andrew Mathers :The reconstruction of the scan is a 3D volume, but you can intersect that volume at any angle. You like to create a 2D image as a cross-section.
Françoise von Trapp :How has Nordson addressed these challenges that you've been describing about planar CT?
Andrew Mathers :So in the past we've had a solution to acquire images called planar CT, which takes images by moving our detector around and keeping the sample and the x-ray source static. But, as I mentioned, there is a lot of artifacts that these types of scans can suffer from. So one thing that we've released more recently and we're really excited about is dynamic planar CT, and this is our next generation of 3D inspection. It's still a planar approach, it's still laminography, but it has some major advancements and improvements over planar CT solution.
Françoise von Trapp :So how does it work? What does it do?
Andrew Mathers :It's a software-based product and it offers high-speed, high-resolution 3D imaging of electronic devices to identify critical defects during the production, particularly in the semiconductor market and the SMT market. And it's a lot, lot faster than plain SET, so it acquires images at twice the speed, which obviously has huge benefits to the customer because it has much higher throughput and much higher units per hour. You certainly don't want the bottleneck in your manufacturing process to be waiting for your x-ray system to check the quality of what you've produced. You want to keep your line or your fab moving at high speed to get your products out the door, and that's what this enables.
Françoise von Trapp :So with planar CT that you were describing, you were talking about laminography. Does the dynamic planar CT still use laminography or is it a different image capture process?
Andrew Mathers :It does still use laminography, but it is a slightly different image capture process. It's far smoother and it uses a much wider field of view, so you can acquire images of a much wider area, which means it can be done a lot more quickly. And it also means that, critically, you are dosing your electronic samples up to a much lower level, and X-ray dose is really quite critical for a lot of x-ray inspection components in the electronics world, like high bandwidth memory. So we take an orbit with our detector which sweeps around the point that we're inspecting and we can take many, many more projections, many, many more 2D radiographs. When we do this, and with a brand new reconstruction algorithm to build these all together, we get a much higher quality 3D model and data out of the other end.
Françoise von Trapp :So how does this impact the image quality?
Andrew Mathers :So it's greatly improved. As I mentioned, one of the biggest challenges is these artifacts that you can't see that makes it very difficult to see between different layers. It also means if you've got quite a dense component on top of something else in your circuit board within your semiconductor sample, it can be very, very hard to see underneath it. And in 3D we can separate out the different layers and we can inspect each one individually, so we can see details that were previously obscured or masked by those dense or really complex components.
Françoise von Trapp :If it's software based, does it remove artifacts or does it prevent them from happening altogether?
Andrew Mathers :The artifacts to a certain degree with this type of imaging are always present, but we take the images in a slightly different way. We take far more images. We take far more individual shots from different angles, far more projections and we have in the past used a more iterative approach to reconstruction, Whereas now, because we've taken far more images, we can leverage different reconstruction techniques and therefore it builds a much higher quality, detailed model in 3D of the sample.
Françoise von Trapp :Are you implementing AI for this?
Andrew Mathers :No, not currently, not this product. We are looking into AI in all sorts of areas, but I'm currently not able to speak about those.
Françoise von Trapp :Okay this tool. Is it something that's used more in development, or is it actually used in the manufacturing side of things?
Andrew Mathers :It's used more in the manufacturing side with my product line with automated X-ray inspection. So it needs to happen extremely quickly. We're talking about capturing a scan of a specific area in under three seconds typically closer to two seconds and it needs to reconstruct very quickly and perform the analysis very quickly as well. So this is for inline manufacturing very, very high speed, short tack time and really high throughput to keep the samples moving down the line or keep samples being analyzed at high speed.
Françoise von Trapp :So how do you distinguish between when something is automated versus, I guess, manual?
Andrew Mathers :I guess manual Sure. So in the manual x-ray world you'll typically have an operator that loads samples on a tray or individually into an inspection area, into a system and they will kick the scan off themselves with the software, wait till the scan's completed and then exchange the sample. The difference here with automated x-ray inspection is samples are typically fed into the systems on a conveyor belt or via a loader, like a magazine loader which you might have in a fab environment for semiconductor, and the samples are analyzed and then taken out the other side or they come out the same side back into the loader and then the next sample is put in. So it's completely automated. There's no human interaction needed. It's all done autonomously.
Françoise von Trapp :Okay, so this is specifically designed for use in volume manufacturing semiconductor fabs and also in SMT and surface mount technology. Okay.
Andrew Mathers :And what?
Françoise von Trapp :about in the advanced packaging facilities. Is it also suitable for there?
Andrew Mathers :No, so that's a different product line. That's our metrology x-ray product line. Anything that's a wafer that's populated, we would do with AXI. But AXM, which is very much the wafer fab very, very beginning level of building a semiconductor wafer, that would be what would be used for that and they don't use dynamic planar CT for that.
Françoise von Trapp :What are some of the applications that this tool is ideally suited for, and where in the manufacturing process would you find the tool?
Andrew Mathers :So this is really good for the semiconductor back end or SMT line in a factory. It's really useful for any 3D application with electronics X-ray inspection. But focus on those two markets. It's really really useful for looking at voiding present in ball grid arrays, imprinted circuit boards in SMT or looking at voiding in micro bumps in flip chip devices in the semiconductor backend. Being able to visualize each layer of the sample and clearly discriminate these voids in high resolution without artifacts from the neighboring or dense, complex components around is really really valuable for our customers and is something they desperately need to ensure high quality of their products.
Françoise von Trapp :So, basically, your customers are able to identify these defects and pull off the line the wafers that are impacted, so that they don't go through continued processing before they end up being packaged into some device that later fails.
Andrew Mathers :Absolutely, that's the entire. Purpose is to ensure that products that aren't of the necessary quality to perform at a high level will be identified, removed from the manufacturing process, to ensure that the quality of what is going out to the end customer is of the highest quality and will perform to the top level.
Françoise von Trapp :Does the tool provide feedback to help in process development further down the road? If you keep finding the same void or defect at a certain stage of the process, can they use that information later to, for instance, improve processes and yields?
Andrew Mathers :Absolutely. And one of the big movements in the manufacturing world at the moment, and in particular electronics, is something called Quality 4.0 or Industry 4.0. And this isn't just something where you're looking at the same defect over time and reporting. This is reporting in a very connected smart factory back to the manufacturing defect over time and this is a reporting in a very connected smart factory back to the manufacturing process to try and remove that defect or critical problem in the samples that are being created. So as a customer, not spending a lot of time making that adjustment, you can make it on the fly and you can quickly correct it and ensure the product coming through is of the quality needed to make the final cut and be sent to the end customer.
Françoise von Trapp :Okay, so to just wrap things up, tell me about Nordson's automated x-ray solution.
Andrew Mathers :So Nordson's current portfolio of automated x-ray solutions can be split into three categories. We have three different system series that serve different markets. We have our XS series, which focuses on the semiconductor market, the X series for SMT and the X hash series, and that supports two markets the power hybrid market and the final assembly, test and pack market. But the thing that all these systems, these different markets, have in common is that they all provide high speed, high resolution and, most critically, high quality imaging with critical defect inspection analysis driven by our advanced in-house algorithm library. We have a direct presence in over 35 countries worldwide, working with the biggest names in the wide world of electronics, and we have an install base in excess of 2000 AXI systems alone.
Françoise von Trapp :What would you say are the three key takeaways you'd like listeners to come away with after listening to this episode?
Andrew Mathers :I think the first one is that there is a real movement going on at the moment away from 2D radiographic imaging alone to judge whether samples are of the highest quality, and there is a move towards 3D imaging to give more detail and higher performance. So, I would say, is the first one. Secondly, what this 3D imaging provides is greater speed of inspection, is greater speed of inspection, so it's faster cycle time, higher units per hour and throughput, whilst it's also reducing the dose given to the samples while they're under x-ray. So this gives you more confident detection of defects due to increased imaging quality and greatly reduced presence of artifacts. And finally, it's a lower cost of ownership to customers, because we don't now need specialized clamping apparatus for these samples, which had to be held in place previously, because of the new, smoother way that we acquire the images. And, fundamentally, dynamic Planar CT helps drive better quality from our customers' products, supporting their development and their success.
Françoise von Trapp :Okay, well, where can people go to learn more then?
Andrew Mathers :They can go to our website, they can go to nortoncom. We also have a YouTube channel and some very nice new videos just created on the Dynamic Planar CT we discussed today.
Françoise von Trapp :So on any of our socials, our websites and just Google around on the internet, Great, and you know what we will do that Googling for them and put some links in the show notes. So thank you so much for joining me today, Andrew. It's been a pleasure.
Andrew Mathers :You're very welcome. Thank you for having me on them
Françoise von Trapp :Next time on the 3D InCites podcast, join me and my guest Pradyush Kamal from Siemens, as we discuss the evolution of EDA since the dawn of 3D integration. There's lots more to come, so tune in next time to the 3D InCites podcast. The 3D InCites podcast is a production of 3D InCites LLC.