PiQC - a process integrated quality control for nondestructive evaluation of ultrasonic wire bonds

Ultrasonic wire bonding is one of the most frequently used techniques in semiconductor production to establish electrical interconnections. Since wire bonded microdevices are used in safety critical systems, a single wire bond failure might cause a fatal system breakdown. Besides steadily increasing integration level and production speed there are extreme demands concerning the quality control of each single wire bond. The described process integrated quality control method, called PiQC, copes with this challenging task of a 100% wire bond inspection. Sensor signals are gained and processed during each welding process to calculate quality related values right after a bond's formation. In addition these calculated quality indices have been evaluated with respect to their expressiveness in a bond failure classification task.