The Art of Tungsten Etching in Semiconductor Chips

Extract

In the course of both physical and failure analysis of semiconductor chips (i.e., verifying what you actually deposited as a layer, vs, what caused the circuit to fail), it is essential to have appropriate deprocessing tools at your disposal in order to evaluate complex semiconductor structures, Deprocessing techniques are developed for each product manufactured and involve multi-step procedures that reveal the layer-by-layer secrets of the chip, These techniques require constant tweaking in duration and procedure as the manufacturing process imposes changes and as the architecture of the semiconductor changes. While there are many tools that assist in these analytical pursuits, such as RIE (reactive ion etching - a dry etching technique), ion milling, and microcleaving, the wet chemical etching of tungsten is sometimes more reproducible than RIE techniques.