Vion Plasma Focused Ion Beam

Innovative Plasma FIB Source Technology

The Vion PFIB plasma FIB is an instrument capable of highly precise high-speed cutting and milling. It has the ability to selectively mill areas of interest. In addition, the PFIB can selectively deposit patterned conductors and insulators.

By combining high-speed milling with precise control, the system can be used in several ways for manufacturing of IC’s, such as:

Failure analysis of bumps, wire bonds, TSVs, and stacked die
Surgically remove package and material to enable failure analysis and fault isolate on buried die
For process monitoring and development at package level
Defect analysis of packaged parts and MEMS devices

Overview
Specifications
Applications
Documents
Optional Equipment

The tool consists of a large vacuum chamber and a focused-ion beam column with inductively coupled plasma ion source. The PFIB column produces a positively charged ion beam. By controlling the duration and location for the ion beam raster, the beam can be used as a precision milling tool. The plasma-generating source provides 20 ~ 100x higher beam currents than traditional gallium-based FIBs while maintaining low beam current capabilities. Additionally, various gasses can be introduced in the chamber which change the beam interaction and cause deposition to occur (either insulator or conductor). With the introduction of other gasses, the etch rate can be selectively modified for a preference of silicon over conductor or vice versa.

Key benefits

Increase your productivity with >20x faster milling
Fast, accurate cross sectioning reveals defects and subsurface features
Wide range of milling and imaging beam currents
Use deposition chemistry to protect surface features
Optional backside access with patented coaxial gas delivery nozzle

	An 80 um wide and 100 um tall bump cross-sectioned with Vion in 20 minutes. Courtesy of Sematech.
	PFIB section and image through three-chip stack exposing interconnecting TSV. Courtesy of Fraunhofer-EMFT, Munich.
	PFIB section and image through wafer-to-wafer bond region, exposing 4 µm diameter interconnecting spheres. Courtesy SINTEF.