Slideshow: The Art of Failure 2009

DINOSAUR EGG: Djemel Lellouchi, of the microelectromechanical systems reliability firm Nova MEMS, in Ramonville, France, found this oddity while investigating the failure of an optical switch. The image won the annual Art of Failure Analysis contest at the 2009 IEEE International Symposium on the Physical and Failure Analysis of Integrated Circuits, in Suzhou, China, 6 to 10 July.

SULFIDE FLOWER: Jia Lu found this sulfurous beauty. <

THE ROOT CAUSE OF FAILURE: These branches develop when a crystal dislocation propagates in a quantum well in a gallium arsenide device. Quantum wells are structures that confine electrons to a two-dimensional sheet in a semiconductor. <

SNAKE’S TAIL: This tiny snake’s tail was born when a tungsten nanoscale probe accidentally hit a hard surface. <

BABY FACE: Ranjan Rajoo of the Institute of Microelectronics, in Singapore, found this humanlike face, the result of an object’s impact on a gold surface. <

BEAUTIFUL BRANCHES: The water needed to clean wafers must be incredibly pure. A small amount of contaminant can lead to this phenomenon: the formation of branches at the boundary between aluminum and silicon nitride.<

BLACK TULIPS: Broken things can be beautiful, too, as shown by this X-ray image of a glass diode cracked in two.<

UGLY DUCKLING: A lump of lead debris on the bottom of an IC looks like a duck “contemplating the future of the semiconductor industry,” says Brady Xie, who captured the image. <

CROUCHING TIGER: The tiger’s fangs are actually a tapered “through silicon via,” a vertical interconnection that runs between two chips stacked atop each other. <

HEAT MASK: An infrared thermogram shows the junction temperature of a transistor’s surface. This temperature is an important failure-analysis parameter. <