Steve,

I used to do F/A... you should get the manufacturer of the part involved. If
you think that by decapping the part (quite dangerous if you use chemicals
without knowledge of those chemicals...and even if you do; and likely that
damage to the die will occur if you use a mill...most plastic parts don't
have a cavity for the die so the surface of the die is in contact with
"plastic") you'll be able to "see" a problem it's, well, unlikely unless
they're literally getting blown up (ESD/EOS). I agree with the other posters
who suggest other avenues. Curve-trace bad parts against a known-good part,
for instance. What electrical properties that are measureable from the
outside (Idd, or Iin for instance) are different? Put a known-good part
through your assembly process and see if it's getting damaged in-process or not.

Mike

On Thu, 24 Jul 2003 13:36:26 EDT, Steve Gregory <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>Hi all!
>
>We've been building an assembly here for quite a while, and just recently
>experienced quite a bit of failures at ICT with one IC. Out of 50 assemblies,
>only 3 passed. The failures on the rest of them have been with one IC at
the same
>location.
>
>I've x-ray'ed the failed parts and don't seen any broken or missing wire
>bonds, so I wanted to take a look at the die area to see if I could spot
something
>obvious.
>
>-Steve Gregory-
>

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