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Viewpoint

February 10, 2026

VIEWPOINT 2026: Thomas Rodgers, Senior Director of Market Strategy, ZEISS Microscopy

The Top Failure Analysis Challenges for Advanced Packaging in 2026

Thomas Rodgers, Senior Director of Market Strategy, Head of Business Sector Electronics, ZEISS Microscopy

The semiconductor industry is entering a new era where performance gains are increasingly delivered through advanced packaging, not just transistor scaling. Chiplets, 2.5D/3D integration, high bandwidth memory (HBM), hybrid bonding, and co-packaged optics (CPO) are enabling unprecedented bandwidth, power efficiency and system-level performance.

But as heterogeneous integration becomes the new norm, failure analysis (FA) is becoming significantly more difficult. The very innovations that unlock performance are creating dense, multi-layered, multi-material structures that push traditional FA tools and methods to the edge.

In 2026, the biggest challenges will stem from:
• deeply buried structures
• heterogeneous materials
• multi-physics interactions
• new interconnect technologies
• chiplet-level system behavior

New and emerging technologies, like CPO, tightly integrate lasers, modulators, photodiodes, and silicon photonics with high-power ASICs. This creates a set of FA challenges that engineers have never had to confront before—photonic failure modes located deep inside the package.

In 2026, we will see more emphasis on cross-disciplinary engineering collaboration to solve these challenges. Multi-modal workflows will be increasingly necessary and will also leverage artificial intelligence to speed up FA—from data collection to defect localization to root-cause analysis. This evolution is essential for supporting the reliability, yield, and performance of next-generation devices.

Thomas Rodgers, Senior Director of Market Strategy, Head of Business Sector Electronics
ZEISS Microscopy
http://www.zeiss.com/semiconductor-microscopy

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Current Characterization of Various Cu RDL Designs In WLP
This study evaluates copper redistribution layer fusing currents in WLP through experiments and simulations, finding that silicon thickness significantly improves heat dissipation and fusing performance.
Amkor Technology