Gadgetory

hi I'm Howard Marx I'm the director here at Nvidia for the technology operations silicon failure analysis lab early on we decided that we needed to have a world-class failure analysis lab that we could look inside of our chips to make sure that they work and what we're getting out of them one of our prime tools here is our focused ion beam by made by Fei a 2.6 million dollar machine that allows us to go in and actually cut into the device to go see where the failures are it consists of a focused ion beam using a gallium ion which is made up of protons and neutrons so it's a very large atom and when it comes down it actually can mill a hole into the device so we can actually cross-section and see exactly what's inside our device it also contains in it a scanning electron microscope which allows us to magnify and image exactly what's going on up to 1.5 million x and giving us a seven angstrom resolution to go look at the very small materials inside our device what they're made of and look for any problems that we can find this is our next one this is a 3d x-ray x-ray allows us to look through the device for any shorts if you look through a device a device is made up of a chip on top of a substrate on a PC board and you can actually see multiple bumps on the x-ray image of the - of the chip on the substrate the substrate bumps and the PC board so unfortunately that means that there's a ball on top of a ball and you can only see the one ball however if you rotated it while you were taking your images you could actually see this made up of two balls so this machine can actually rotate the chip take thousands of images and then we take and convert those images into a movie it used to take 11 hours to do that conversion now using that CUDA card with takes only three minutes to do that same conversion hence we get a 3d image of exactly what is inside the chip we can see the bond wires we can see the interfaces we can see the balls we can see the vias between inside the PC board so that we can look for problems and look for how it's made and how well it's made all right here we have another piece of equipment this is our backside probing this is our omission system when a transistor turns on inside the device electrons travel through the semiconductor channel and give off photons they give off both infrared photons in the thermal range and in the emission range so that we can look and find out where the failing transistor is this is actually an upside down camera so that we can then put a PC on top of here and actually look inside the chip while it's running an application it has in a camera the same kind of camera used in the Hubble telescope to go look at little points of light from the stars which is the same infrared light that comes out of our chip when a transistor turns on the camera is actually kept at liquid nitrogen temperatures in order for the camera to not contribute any heat to the source it has maximum magnification so that we can see all the way down to a transistor and see how it behaves thanks for coming visit us at the Nvidia silicon failure analysis lab see us on Twitter and Facebook and Vidia GeForce