cfaed Seminar Series
cfaed Seminar Series
Prof. Ingrid De Wolf , IMEC & KU Leuven, Belgium
Mechanical stress in microelectronics: a blessing or a curse?
10.05.2016 (Tuesday)
, 17:00
BIOTEC, Seminar Room E05/E06 , Tatzberg 47/49 , 01307 Dresden
Free entrance - Everybody is welcome!
Already very early in the development history of microelectronics components, researchers ran into problems with ‘stress’. Actually, one could have expected this: When putting different materials together, with different thermal expansion coefficients or lattice distances, and subjecting them to high temperature steps, stress is bound to pop-up. And too high stress easily results in damage. However, mechanical stress is not always bad. It affects important material properties such as the mobility of charge carriers and helps MEMS to stay straight. As such, it can be turned into something positive. Indeed, also microelectronics devices, in some cases, work better under stress.
This lecture will present the never-ending story of stress in microelectronics and show how stress was measured and modeled, and, depending on the situation, solved, used or circumvented. It is a story of the good, the bad and the ugly.
Ingrid De Wolf received the PhD in Physics from the KU Leuven university, Belgium, in 1989. In the same year she joined imec in Belgium, where she worked in the field of microelectronics reliability, with special attention for gate oxide reliability, mechanical stress analysis using micro-Raman spectroscopy and failure analysis using emission microscopy. From 1999 to 2014, she headed the group REMO, where research is focused on reliability, test, modelling and failure analysis of 3D technology, interconnect, MEMS and packaging. She managed to grow this group from a small team of 3 members to a highly recognized group of about 40 people which is involved in several research programs within imec (3D, interconnect, Optical IO, GaN, Litho, PV, MEMS, STT-MRAM,...). She authored or co-authored 14 book chapters and more than 350 publications, and won several best paper awards at conferences focusing on reliability and failure analysis. She is chief scientist at imec, IEEE senior member and professor at the department of Materials Engineering of the KU Leuven where she teaches courses on non-destructive testing, MEMS reliability and failure analysis, characterization techniques and FMEA.