My professional career I've been working for Broadcom Inc. (formally LSI/Avago) for 11 years as a failure analysis engineering. I’ve been tasked to find the root cause of failure for IC devices that have either failing during reliability testing or with the customer. The best analogy for what I do would be I am tasked to find the one light switch not working in the entire state of CO.To perform this job a vast knowledge of tools and techniques are needed. Through the years of work I've learned on how. The first step is to isolate the failure through the use of thermal, PEM, DLS/SLS, and scan/memory diagnostics. Once the defect's general location has been found the physical analysis begins in search of the suspect. The device is deprocessed layer-by-layer through the use of wet/dry chemicals and P-lapping. Once the suspect area has been reach I being to electrically analysis the circuits using nanoprobing tools. This is done at each layer till the defect can ben isolated to the suspect transistor(s). Again, using nanoprobing techniques the suspect site is further isolate to a specific part of the transistor. Once fully isolated it is then submitted for cross-section to obtain a "smoking gun" image of the defect.Technically I am working my self out of a job, but with newer technology the challenges and failures keep coming.
Listed skills include Ic, Testing, Cmos, Asic, and 6 others.