Dye and pull analysis involves submerging a board or device in a red liquid dye, this allows the dye to penetrate any cracks or other opens in the solder joints/balls that are exposed to the exterior.

After bake-out and drying, the solder joints are pulled from the board using jig and followed by microscope inspection. Solder joints with pre-existing cracks will be marked by the dried red dye.

X-ray or CT inspection is a non-destructive technique which uses X-rays to allow cross-sections inspection at multiple magnifications, angles with X-ray source settings.

Electrical Verification Test is a process to verify the electrical parameters or characterize the failure mode of a given device using various bench equipment such as multimeter, source-measure unit (SMU), curve tracer, oscilloscope and more.

Decapsulation is also known as Decapping or Delidding. A failure analysis step performed to open epoxy mould package of IC to facilitate the inspection, chemical analysis, or electrical examination of the die and the internal features of the package. There are several methods available such as chemical decap, laser decap, plasma decap and mechanical decap.

Photon Emission Microscopy (PHEM) is a highly reliable technique for defect localisation for the semiconductor failure analysis. PHEM consists of a highly sensitive CCD detector capable of detecting photons emitted from electron-hole pair recombination of the defect site.

Defects can also generate excessive heat when power-up because they consume extra current. Thermal Emission Microscope (THEM) is a useful technique to measure visible or near-infrared light by a specialized camera. The camera is sensitive to photons with wavelengths from 3 to 10 µm. These wavelengths correspond to heat so that the image obtained with the camera can be converted into a thermal map of tested devices.

The salt spray test is a standardized and popular corrosion test method, used to check corrosion resistance of materials and surface coatings.

Thermal shock testing or cycling exposes products to alternating low and high air temperatures to accelerate failures caused by repeated temperature variations during normal use conditions. The transition between temperature extremes occurs very rapidly during thermal shock testing meanwhile temperature cycle testing uses slower rates of temperature change.

Temperature and humidity testing determine how components, subsystems and complete systems behave in severe environments that involve elevated temperatures and high or fluctuating relative humidity.

Vibrations have been known to cause excessive wear, loosen fasteners, loosen connections, components damage, and causing devices to malfunction. Mechanical shock testing typically involves subjecting a test device to sudden and extreme amounts of acceleration or deceleration while instrumentation, such as strain gages, load cells, piezo sensors and more