Digital & Analog Integrated Circuits

Exponent has a long history of consulting in the consumer electronics arena. We’ve found that often times failures can be isolated to a specific IC in the device or a design effort can be simplified by choosing the IC that’s best suited for the intended application. Many of Exponent’s consultants have first-hand experience with IC fabrication at all levels of the manufacturing process including:

Material selection
Device layout
Lithography (optical or electron beam)
Oxidation
Deposition (chemical vapor deposition or molecular-beam epitaxy)
Metallization (evaporation or sputtering)
Etching (wet or plasma)
IC packaging (dicing, wire bonding, package sealing)
Final characterization

Exponent assists at any stage of the IC process, from choosing the right process steps for desired device architecture to package design qualification. Our packaging expertise includes: hermetic packaging, wafer encapsulation, wafer level packaging, plastic mold packaging; wafer bonding, wire bonding, flip chip, die attach materials, chip on board, and COTS packaging.

At Exponent we have experience de-capping and de-processing ICs and using advanced metrology techniques to inspect the IC using optical and electron microscopy, focused ion beam (FIB) milling for cross-sectional analysis or energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) analysis. Alternatively, we can perform non-destructive cross-sectional analysis via 3D X-ray Computed Tomography (CT). We also routinely characterize IC performance on a probe station, a curve tracer, or other custom setup for advanced electrical testing in order to arrive at a desired solution.