UBM TechInsights has analytical capabilities that span from silicon to software to electronic systems. We have a huge arsenal of sophisticated test equipment and tooling, much of which is proprietary, to ensure accurate and timely analysis for our clients.
Process
We have done process analysis in technologies that include CMOS, BiCMOS, Bipolar, SiGe, GaAs, CCDs, LCDs & photovoltaic, to name a few. Here is a detailed description of the techniques employed by UBM TechInsights’ process analysis department. For chip-level work we depend upon a wide variety of in-house and external lab services:
- In-house Lab Services: Optical microscopy; Scanning electron microscopy and field emission scanning electronic microscopy (SEM and FESEM); Transmission electron microscopy (TEM); scanning capacitance microscopy (SCM); energy dispersive x-ray spectroscopy (EDS); package x-ray; advanced, proprietary sample preparation including device de-encapsulation, thinning, sectioning and de-layering, including reactive ion etching (RIE); sub-micron device probing (nanoprobing) and electrical measurement.
- External Lab Services (under contract): focused ion beam analysis and microsurgery (FIB); auger analysis; secondary ion mass spectroscopy (SIMS); scanning probe microscopy; spreading resistance probe measurement (SRP); wavelength dispersive spectrometry (WDX); electron beam induced current (EBIC); Rutherford back scattering (RBS); Raman spectroscopy.
For semi-automated circuit analysis we have proprietary tooling that manages image capture, stitching, and alignment, layout creation, productivity enhancing circuit extraction, cell extraction, netlist navigation & query tools and schematic library searching.
Software & Systems
Disassemblers, decompilers, in-circuit emulators, protocol analyzers, common hardware platform development and debug tools, logic analyzers, scopes, and hardware simulation capabilities are a few examples of software and system-level tooling for analyses.