Test automation using LabView

Contacts:

Henrik H. Henrichsen, DTU Nanotech, 4525-5788 (henrik.henrichsen@nanotech.dtu.dk)

Peter Bøggild, DTU Nanotech, 4525-5723, (peter.boggild@nanotech.dtu.dk)

Wafer being examined in optical microscope. Inspection of hundreds of chips in a wafer is extremely time consuming, and therefore only few chips are usually checked. Accurate statistics and mapping of useable chips would be a very valuable tool for a large number of researchers at DTU Nanotech.

Inspection of microchips on wafers using optical microscopes is extremely time consuming and an obvious task for automation. Researchers at DTU Nanotech often produce wafers containing hundreds of microchips to investigate new device designs. Fabrication procedures are constantly changed because new routines are being tested, and visual inspection using optical microscopes is one of the most important tools to verify the result of a fabrication process. To make fabrication evaluation much more efficient, wafer inspection in the optical microscope can be optimised by using a LabView controlled stage and digital camera mounted on the microscope. However, this requires intelligent programming of the microscope stage and clever image processing.

The main objective of this project is first to setup the computer control of the motorised stage and digital camera on the microscope. Then autofocus must be implemented, and the LabView program must be able to output an image of all chips on a wafer, given the coordinates of each chip.

If the primary objectives of the project are successful, further development could be to implement image recognition functions to enhance the automated testing. This could be used for automatic statistics on chip dimensions or to check how many cantilevers on a wafer that has survived the fabrication. Automatic electrical probing of individual chips on the wafer scale is another highly useable feature.

In this project you will mainly be working with LabView programming. In addition, the mechanical setup can be adapted to best suit the functions of the LabView program.