Chiba, Japan--The Inspection Products division of Electroglas, Inc., a supplier of process management tools for the semiconductor industry, has introduced a high-speed, automated optical inspection system for the identification and classification of defects on wafers with gold, bumped die contacts. Driver ICs for liquid-crystal displays use gold bumps as their contacts for direct connection to the thin-film circuits on display glass panels.

QuickSilver, for gold bump inspection, uses a special lighting system and image processing developed for the inspection and measurement of gold bumps. The instrument measures the length, width, area, location, and reflectivity of every gold bump on every wafer at full production-line speed, while it detects bridged bumps; missing and extra bumps; bump cracks, scratches, nodules, and pits; and extraneous material on wafers. "Such surface aspects as granularity, pits, and ridges along the perimeter must be very accurately resolved for each gold bump. Doing so requires lighting techniques different than those successfully used to inspect other kinds of bumps," says Joe Savarese, general manager of Electroglas Inspection Products.

QuickSilver for gold bump inspection is supported by the QuickLook Process Visualization Workstation, which enables detailed analyses of gold-bump data provided from one or more of the inspection systems by organizing, presenting and comparing wafer maps, defect maps, measurement files, and wafer images. Various formatting options allow a bump-process engineer to easily visualize large volumes of inspection data to make expert process decisions, according to the company.

QuickSilver is available now.