Technical Editor Paul Rako looks at analog technology in power supplies, interface, the signal path, and life in general.
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Analog Design Articles
- Is your amplifier offset way out of whack?
- Diagnostic ultrasound gets smaller, faster, and more useful
- Analog Devices, Infineon collaborate on air-bag systems
- Can’t see the forest ...
- EDN on Analog: Addressing signal and power integrity
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Blog
Saturday, January 3, 2009
Repairing chips with an ion beam
Jan 3 2009 10:43AM | Permalink |Email this|Comments (1) |
The Christian Science Monitor has an interesting article about a grad student using an ion beam machine to do cuts and jumps in the metallization of an integrated circuit. I saw these machines when I consulted at Schumberger, who had bought up the old Fairchild test division. It always amused me that both IC designers and board designers use cutting and jumping of traces to troubleshoot their circuits. My analog IC deign buddies tell me they frequently will put a few extra transistors or structures in a prototype IC so that they can jump it into a circuit if they need to. What I have seen is them using lasers to do the melting and fusion, perhaps because analog ICs have much wider line widths than new generation digital chips.
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Reader Comments
at 1/7/2009 1:45:36 PM, App. Eng. said:
Back in the late ''70s I was an Applications Engineer at General Instrument Corp., when VLSI was new. From time to time, a customer would find a problem that was outside out usual testing, requiring a minor design change. To test if the design change would actually solve the problem, we would probe the chip metallization runs using fine point pins on motion reduction manipulators, and sometimes add external transistors in this way. Current design rules are likely far too small for this approcah to be used today. Those were the good old days.
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