In cases where our customers experience yield reduction due to product or process failure or setback, Adco Engineering offers comprehensive integration of our services and capabilities to determine the root cause of failure and recommend effective solutions to overcome a problem ensuring the optimal course to continuous improvement of technology.

Regardless whether your failure involves metallic, ceramic, organic or composite material or component, or occurs as a result of interaction between different media or substances our collective expertise will help you to discover in an accurate and timely fashion why the problem occurred, learn from it, and take appropriate actions to prevent reoccurrence. The cause of a failure must be ascertained to improve reliability and to correct errant process steps.

The conditions that promoted the failure are essential in identifying the underlying factors that may have initiated the failure. Other elements that may not be readily acknowledged in failure analysis, yet are no less important, are common sense, a critical and unbiased mode of thinking, experience, knowledge, and experimental observations that can be based on contact or non-contact measuring systems and can be used to measure a wide variety of features and dimensions on components, assemblies and parts.

To investigate a failure, and analyze the conditions that promoted the failure, important information must be collected on the failed part or coating. Background information on the type and application procedure, the service history and environment, and physical evidence of the failed part are necessary to determine why, how, when, and where a failure may have occurred. If these answers are provided during the course of the investigation, future failures may be better understood or possibly prevented.

Various analytical, non-destructive inspection techniques are available for failure analysis starting with visual optical inspection and critical dimension measurements employing CMM methods and artifacts whose dimensions are known with nanometer-scale accuracy. Surface condition and morphology evaluation is important part of failure analysis as surface microstructure affects components operation. Compact, "bench-top" sized plasma etcher that uses dry plasma chemistry to reveal hidden detail for SEM and TEM analysis. This room-temperature plasma etching process works selectively, gently, and is well-suited for many applications. Additionally, it is also widely used for the cleaning in sample preparation.

The scanning acoustic microscope (C-SAM) is of particular interest for investigating subsurface features in materials such as pores and cracks.
	Subsurface cracking as shown in a scanning acoustic micrograph.