J. C. Hahn, Altera Corp., San Jose, CA

Summary: Conventional deprocessing (or delayering) techniques ('parallel lapping' or 'polishing') can only maintain planarity over a small area (a few tens of microns). Analysis is restricted to a small area, or if analysis on multiple sites is required, one would typically have to perform several iterations of deprocessing. This PFA technique eliminates or reduces the need of committing the sample to repeated deprocessing steps, thus saving time and resources.