When your car breaks down, you take it to the mechanic. When a computer chip fails, engineers go to the failure analysis team. It’s their job diagnose what went wrong and work to prevent this from happening in the future.
The International Symposium on the Physical and Failure Analysis of Integrated Circuits (IPFA) is an annual conference in Asia for failure analysis engineers. The meeting is mostly technical, but there is also a fun part: Analyzing the art of failure competition.
“It’s all about creativity and a strong imagination,” he says Willie Yeohchairman of this year’s Art of Failure Analysis competition. Anyone in the failure analysis community can submit an image taken during their daily work that contains something surprising or unexpected, such as a melted piece of silicon that looks like a dinosaur. Ten photos will be selected by the conference committee as the most interesting, and conference attendees will then vote on their favorite of them.
We have collected a collection of photos from the 2022 and 2024 Art of Failure Analysis competitions (it did not take place in 2023). Which one would you vote for?
Ballerina under the microscope
John Saputil/Analog Devices
Engineers at Analog Devices in the Philippines looked for the presence of foreign materials on the faulty device using a scanning electron microscope. They must have found the misplaced materials on this chip, appearing in the shape of a dancer in mid-rotation.
High voltage horse
Mick Johnix Yu/Analog Devices
Analog Devices’ Mick Johnix Yu investigated how the battery management system failed. It suffered “electrical surge” damage, which is when the current or voltage is too high and causes thermal damage. Yu thought this damage looked like a black horse.
A window to silicon
KC Chng/AMD
Monster Blob
Marilou Regodon/microchips
This swirling monster with big eyes appeared during testing of an integrated circuit case used to attach silicon dies to a printed circuit board. Marilou Regodon, an engineer at Microchip Technology who took the picture, called it a “terrifying twist on your nightmare” in a presentation at the conference.
The chick got up
John Roland Dean/Microchip Technology Operations Corp.
Emerging from the depths of ambient silicon, this newly hatched chick appeared to John Roland Dean of Microchip Technology. This was caused by an electrical surge that bonded the polycrystalline materials together.
Electric Labyrinth
Lan Yin Lee/AMD
Lan Yin Lee of AMD in Singapore observed this maze on the die structure after removing the insulating protective layer. The walls of the maze captured by the scanning electron microscope are only micrometers (one millionth of a meter) long.
He’s following you
Herminso Villarraga Gómez/Zeiss
Stare at this electromagnetic solenoid long enough and it might start staring back. Do you see a ghost, a dog or something else? “You have to use a bit of imagination,” says Herminso Villarraga Gómez, who took the photo while doing an assemblage analysis of the piece.
Roots of damage
Left: Tsang Yat Fung/A*STAR; Right: iStock
Disturbance analysis engineers from Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) discovered the roots of the ginseng plant during their investigations.
Skull mask
IPFA
This micrometer bump looks like a ghostly mask if you look at it from the right angle.
Sunflower
MA-tek
These patterns on the surface of the silicon wafer reminded its discoverers of a field of sunflowers.
Lips
IPFA
If these lips could talk, maybe they would let us know why their device broke and save the failure analysis team some work.
Flowering anemone
MA-tek
This flower could be a sea anemone as reported by the submitting team MA-tekin Taiwan, he thought. We thought it could also be a flower or a porcupine. what do you see
