When your car breaks down, you take it to the mechanic. When a computer chip fails, engineers go to the failure-analysis team. It’s their job to diagnose what went wrong and work to make sure it doesn’t in the future.
The International Symposium on the Physical and Failure Analysis of Integrated Circuits (IPFA) is a yearly conference in Asia attended by failure-analysis engineers. The gathering is mostly technical, but there’s also a fun part: The Art of Failure Analysis contest.
“It’s all about creativity and strong imagination,” says Willie Yeoh, chair of the Art of Failure Analysis contest this year. Anyone in the failure-analysis community can submit an image taken during their everyday work that includes something surprising or unexpected, like a melted bit of silicon that looks like a dinosaur. Ten photos are chosen by the conference committee as the most interesting, and then conference attendees vote on their favorite among those.
We’ve gathered a collection of photos from the 2022 and 2024 Art of Failure Analysis contests (it did not run in 2023). Which one would you vote for?
Ballerina Under the Microscope
John Saputil/Analog Devices
Engineers at Analog Devices in the Philippines were searching for the presence of foreign materials on a failed device using a scanning electron microscope. They certainly found those out-of-place materials on this chip, appearing in the shape of a dancer midspin.
High-Voltage Horse
Mick Johnix Yu/Analog Devices
Mick Johnix Yu at Analog Devices was investigating how a battery management system failed. It had suffered from ”electrical overstress” damage, which is when a current or voltage is too high, causing thermal damage. Yu thought this damage looked like a black horse.
A Window into Silicon
KC Chng/AMD
The Monster Blob
Marilou Regodon/Microchips
This swirling monster with large eyes appeared when testing an integrated circuit package used to connect silicon dies to a printed circuit board. Marilou Regodon, the engineer from Microchip Technology who took the image, called it a “terrifying twist in your nightmare” in her submission to the conference.
The Chick Has Risen
John Roland Dean/Microchip Technology Operations Corp.
This newly hatched chick rising from the depths of surrounding silicon appeared to John Roland Dean of Microchip Technology. It was caused by an electrical overstress that fused polycrystalline materials together.
Electric Labyrinth
Lan Yin Lee/AMD
Lan Yin Lee at AMD in Singapore observed this maze on a die structure after removing an insulating protective layer. The walls of the maze, captured with a scanning electron microscope, are only micrometers (one-millionth of a meter) long.
It’s Watching You
Herminso Villarraga Gómez/Zeiss
Stare long enough at this electromagnetic solenoid and it might start to stare back. Do you see a ghost, a dog, or something else? “You have to put in a little bit of imagination,” says Herminso Villarraga Gómez, who took the photo as he conducted assembly analysis on this part.
Damage Taking Root
Left: Tsang Yat Fung/A*STAR; Right: iStock
Failure-analysis engineers at Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology, and Research (A*STAR) spotted the roots of a ginseng plant in their investigations.
The Skull Mask
IPFA
This micrometer-long bulge looks like a creepy mask if viewed at the right angle.
Sunflower
MA-tek
These patterns in the surface of a silicon wafer reminded its discoverer of a field of sunflowers.
Lips
IPFA
If these lips could speak, perhaps they’d let us know why their device broke and save the failure-analysis team some work.
Flowering Sea Anemone
MA-tek
This bloom could be a sea anemone, as the submitting team at MA-tek, in Taiwan, thought. We thought it could also be a flower or porcupine. What do you see?
