Marc D. Knox

Development of a flexible chip infrared (IR) thermal imaging system for product qualification

A flexible and efficient chip Infrared (IR) thermal imaging system was implemented on the product manufacturing test platform by collaboration with the burn-in/wafer test, systems, process, and failure analysis teams. A liquid cooling cell was successfully designed and tested. The imaging system was applied to investigate some wafer probe power/thermal issues for server high end products. Furthermore, we applied the method of Spatially-resolved Imaging of Microprocessor Power (SIMP) [1] to translate the thermal map into a power map. Finally, we propose a new concept of product thermal qualification as a supplement and potential alternative to the traditional thermal test vehicle (TTV) qualification.

Optimization of silicon technology for the IBM system z9

IBM 90-nm silicon-on-insulator (SOI) technology was used for the key chips in the System z9TM processor chipset. Along with system design, optimization of some critical features of this technology enabled the z9TM to achieve double the system performance of the previous generation. These technology improvements included logic and SRAM FET optimization, mask fabrication, lithography and wafer processing, and interconnect technology. Reliability improvements such as SRAM optimization and burn-in reliability screen are also described.