Date: Tuesday, February 3, 2009

6:00pm: Networking/Pizza Social
6:30pm: Presentation
8:00pm: Adjourn

Title

Hazardous substance detection for electronic materials using Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS)

Speaker

Dr. Rick Russo, Applied Spectra, Inc.

Abstract

With recent adoption of RoHS (Restriction on Hazardous Substances) initiative by many Asian and European countries, electronic product manufacturers and their component suppliers are banned from using certain elemental and organic substances above the specified concentration. With far more extensive substance initiatives such as RoHS II and REACH on the horizon, it is becoming critical for the impacted industry to assess and define appropriate analytical technologies to monitor regulated hazardous elements and organic substances. Currently, common testing methodologies for RoHS elements such as lead, mercury, cadmium, and chromium include AA (Atomic Absorption), ICP-AES (Inductively Coupled Plasma - Atomic Emission Spectroscopy), and ICP-MS (Inductively Coupled Plasma - Mass Spectrometry). Disadvantages of these analytical methods are extensive sample preparation processes that often require dissolution of samples in acid solutions and low analysis throughput. Consequently, they are usually not the ideal analytical technologies that can be implemented on the production floor to check RoHS compliance for finished goods and raw materials. Other non-destructive analytical technique such as EDXRF (Energy Dispersive X-ray Fluorescence) has been used as a screening technique for RoHS compliance testing. However, EDXRF has been documented to suffer from poor precision performance for analysis involving small spots and challenging sample structures involving multi-layer stacks, thin plating, and coating materials.

LIBS (Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy) is a highly flexible analytical technology that may be applied to a wide range of sample matrices and sample structures. In LIBS, luminous, short-lived plasma is created on the sample surface by a focused laser beam and its emission spectra is analyzed to provide both qualitative and quantitative chemical compositional analysis. LIBS analysis time is instantaneous and can be readily combined with other manufacturing processes involving laser ablation, allowing real-time chemical composition feedback. LIBS can be an effective, alternative elemental analysis solution for RoHS compliance testing. Commercial LIBS systems are becoming adopted for RoHS compliance testing for semiconductor chip packaging materials. LIBS has significantly shortened the analysis time with detection limit approaching ppm level for most of RoHS elements. Recent innovation in LIBS technology now enables detection of halogen elements down to a few hundreds of ppm level, opposed to the percent level limit demonstrated by conventional LIBS detection configuration. Thus, LIBS can be highly effective analytical technique for fast, in-line RoHS and halogen free (Green) compliance verification. Today LIBS systems are being used to monitor trace level of RoHS regulated substance such as lead in thin tin plating of leadframes, solder balls of FPGA packages, plastic dies and mold of the chip packages as well as paint films on children's toy.

Biography

Dr. Rick Russo is the founder of Applied Spectra, Inc. (ASI) and A3 Technologies (A3) These companies design, fabricate, test and market advanced spectroscopic instrumentation for security, military and commercial applications. Dr. Russo has an international scientific reputation in chemistry and physics related to nanosecond and femtosecond laser-material-interactions, with almost 30 year experience in fluorescence, LIBS, Raman, ICP-MS, materials, and other technologies. Dr. Russo has a 27 year appointment at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is the founder and scientific director for the laser material interactions group, with programs in chemistry, materials science, lasers, spectroscopy, ultrasonics, imaging, and electronics. Dr. Russo is co-inventor of the nanowire laser, and developer of a real-time standoff laser ultrasonic sensor (R&D100 2006). He also is co-inventor of a process for ion nano-texturing (ITEX) thin-films, lead-inventor of the ion-assisted pulsed laser deposition (IBAD) process, and a pioneer in elucidating fundamental laser heating and laser ablation processes for chemical analysis. He has over 200 Scientific Publications; 45 Refereed Proceedings; 210 (98 Invited) Presentations, 9 Book Chapters and 8 Patents. Twelve students have received their PhD degree under his direction at the University of California, Berkeley. He also is a visiting scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where, amongst other achievements he established laser laboratories for ablation, LIBS, fluorescence and Raman in the Glen T. Seabourg Transactinium Institute. He got a BS in Chemistry from University of Florida and a PhD in Chemistry from Indiana University.