The Future of Advanced Packaging Inspection Is X-ray

Estimated reading time: 1 minute

Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from a paper at the 2024 SMTA Wafer-Level Packaging Symposium. For access to the full paper, please refer to the SMTA Knowledge Base at www.smta.org.

Driven by smartphones, high-performance computers, and artificial intelligence, the global demand for high-end computing power is constantly rising. The industry is also facing demands for miniaturization, which creates the need for ever-smaller defect recognition. The semiconductor industry has been identifying and solving these challenges for decades using various optical inspection and SEM tools. However, with the development of 2.5 and 3D packaging, using these optical tools has become less effective and/or time-consuming and expensive. The need to see internal defects has also made these tools destructive.

Detecting and understanding killer defects quickly can decrease time to market, increase yield, and improve process controls, all of which are vital for foundries and OSATs to develop competitive technologies in a fast-changing environment. To continue to find these killer defects requires the change from these typical inspection methods to non-destructive techniques.

While historically X-ray inspection was not the preferred technology, advances in image resolution and speed have made it the unique solution for inspecting 3D packaging non-destructively today.

Advanced packaging companies seek non-destructive automated inspection tools that are fast enough to provide value within their production processes, increase yield, and reduce waste at an early stage. This article will give an overview on how X-ray and laminography inspection can provide value-added data and information within minutes instead of weeks, for exactly that.

To read this entire article, which appeared in the April 2025 issue of SMT007 Magazine, click here.