The Iggblog

so I got this job…

I got myslef employed last wednesday. I’m working at SonoScan in Burlington. They do acoustic microscopy. basically looking at stuff (usually electronics) with ultrasound. I’ve been looking at microchips and diodes and stuff. we’ll get a part and we’ll have to scan it to see if there are any voids like air buybbles and whatnot. and we can tell if the wire leads are pulling away from the chip surface, or if the chip is pulling off of the backing paddle. we can da all kinds of cool stuff. normally we’ll focus in on one layer of the chip. we use an oscilloscope readout and focus in on certain contact echos to find what we’re looking at. kind of like old-school sonar. then we get a picture of what the inside of the chip looks like. we can also do a vertical cross section to get a number of features and how they “stack up” on eachother. we can also do a “thru-scan” that looks a lot like an x-ray… it shoots through and reads anything that blocks the ultrasound. it can’t transmit thorugh air, so any air bubbles will come up as black dots. it’s really pretty cool. certainly more entertaining than unemployment.

-IggDawg