Director of New Jersey Micro-Electronic Testing (NJMET) Laboratory, Joseph Federico has led the Mission Imposter testing program that is used to validate the authenticity of electronic components.
Federico announced that the laboratory has started employing CSAM acoustic microscopy testing to detect non-authentic electronic units. The CSAM acoustic microscopy technique is a screening method utilized to find out irregularities in the construction and packaging of electronic units.
The benefits of this screening technique that is of non-destructive type include identification of empty spaces, cracks, delaminations, fractures and other faults that occurs inside materials and devices such as encapsulating materials, CSP’s, and SOIC’s.
An acoustic microscope emits ultrasounds that range from 5 to 400 MHz to obtain size resolution at the micro-scale. The ultrasound penetrating a sample may be reflected, absorbed, or scattered by either the material or its internal features. These characteristics are similar to light behavior. In order to develop acoustic images, ultrasound that travels through the overall sample thickness or that reflects from an internal component is used. According to Federico, CSAM has been successfully used in their laboratory to expose differences of an authentic electronic component in comparison with a suspect component by not just examining surface scans to expose contrasts in component surfaces but also by detecting internal device popcorning that failed to meet the manufacturers maximum temperature operating range.
Source: http://www.njmetmtl.com