A controlled, mechanical method for MEMS decapsulation

As the applications of micro electronic mechanical system (MEMS) are booming, more and more research and development activities are involved in the MEMS industry. For every new MEMS product with new functions, the manufacturing process will be tailored to cope with the changes. This requires reliability work to ensure the robustness of the new process. Thus, failure analysis plays an important role in the process development and the success rate for MEMS FA will be critical. In this paper, we will discuss a new decapsulation approach using a wedge diamond indenter based tool. It is a pure mechanical method and most of all, the whole process can be visually guided and monitored with the onboard optical vision system. The precision knob based operation is controllable, which makes the success rate very high by every user. We have successfully applied this method to our MEMS FA cases and this paper will detail our experiences.