SEM/TEM of the Month
Staff -- Semiconductor International, 9/1/2001
Researchers at Chipworks Inc. (Ottawa, Canada), which provides reverse engineering services, found these "creatures" on a Samsung 16 Mb DRAM they had decapsulated. After closer examination, they discovered that the scary little guys were actually aluminum sulfate crystals. "My guess was that we did not rinse the die sufficiently after dissolving the plastic in sulfuric acid, and after a few days the acid reacted with the aluminum of the bond pads," said Dick James, a senior technical adviser for Chipworks. "A good lesson for us to be careful!"
Please send submissions for SEM/TEM of theMonth to Peter Singer, Editor-in-Chief, 58 Summer St., Andover, MA 01810 USA. E-mail: sieditor@aol.com.
