V. Korchnoy, Intel Israel (74) Ltd, Haifa, Israel

Summary: Bond-pad integrity directly affects the performance of microelectronic devices. Bond-pad cracking and related to it under-pad cracking of Inter-Metal Dielectric (IMD) may bring a high reliability risk and cause units to fail at environmental stress. Bond pad cracks could be initiated by probing during wafer sort and at wire bonding process during assembly. This paper presents the comparative analysis of the different chemistries used for exposure and decoration of pad cracks. The device was fabricated with 0.18 ƒİm CMOS technology, has aluminum/TiN bond pads and gold wire bonds. Four different chemistries have been tried: Ferric Cyanide; Tri-iodine; Aqua Regia; hot Phosphoric acid. The investigation results showed that Tri-iodine etchant provides clean and artifact-free exposure of TiN barrier layer of the pad and is the best (from the tried methods) for pad cracks observation