Nondestructive evaluation of ceramic substrate with embedded passive components by SAM

Delaminations of embedded passive components are often associated with reliability problems. Understanding the delamination can help us quickly identify the failure caused at an early stage of failure analysis. In this work, defects in buried capacitors have been detected by use of scanning acoustic microscopy (SAM). Defects in buried capacitors caused by thermal shock have also been clearly observed. The results show that SAM can be a powerful analytical tool for the nondestructive evaluation of delaminations in buried passive components. Through transmission scan (THRU-scan) is a fast method to defect the existence of internal defects, while Tomographic Acoustic Multiple Imaging scan (TAMI-scan) is shown to be capable of detecting the location and size of delaminations and voids.