Automated Full Wafer FIB Marking – A Smart Way to Improve Overall FA Efficiency and Reduce Human Errors
Automated Full Wafer FIB Marking – A Smart Way to Improve Overall FA Efficiency and Reduce Human Errors
Monday, November 17, 2025: 11:50 AM
1 (Pasadena Convention Center)
Summary:
Focused Ion Beam (FIB) marking on integrated circuit (IC) has been implemented for decades; where the die of interest (DOI) is manually counted, cleaved or plucked from a wafer for FIB marking to facilitate physical failure analysis (pFA) work. This method has become less efficient when involving a large volume of DOIs requiring FIB marking. In addition, this method is human error risk questionable, where mis-counting, mis-labeling and mis-marking are common, typically on high count and small die-size products (wafer). In this paper, we introduce an Automated Full Wafer FIB marking method to replace the conventional way. We also showcase step-by-step guide on the automated workflow and finally discuss the results and compare the automated method to the conventional method.
Focused Ion Beam (FIB) marking on integrated circuit (IC) has been implemented for decades; where the die of interest (DOI) is manually counted, cleaved or plucked from a wafer for FIB marking to facilitate physical failure analysis (pFA) work. This method has become less efficient when involving a large volume of DOIs requiring FIB marking. In addition, this method is human error risk questionable, where mis-counting, mis-labeling and mis-marking are common, typically on high count and small die-size products (wafer). In this paper, we introduce an Automated Full Wafer FIB marking method to replace the conventional way. We also showcase step-by-step guide on the automated workflow and finally discuss the results and compare the automated method to the conventional method.