QuantumDiamonds GmbH demonstrated a new method for imaging electrical current inside a semiconductor structure without making physical contact with it, unveiled September 2, 2026 at SEMICON Taiwan in Taipei. The technique removes the physical-connection requirement that has confined quantum-sensing-based current imaging to failure analysis labs, and QD calls it the foundational step toward inline inspection in high-volume manufacturing. "This is the most important technical milestone on our path to inline electrical inspection," said Kevin Berghoff, CEO of QuantumDiamonds.
Every prior current-imaging technique needed a physical electrical connection, whether through package pins, a probe card, or exposed pads, to make current flow before it could be imaged. That works in a failure analysis lab, where a single sample gets wired up and studied at length, but a production line cannot afford a dedicated connection for every device. QD's new method instead excites current electromagnetically, using microwave fields rather than a direct electrical bias. The induced currents generate magnetic fields, which the same diamond quantum sensor head used in QD's commercial QDm.1 failure-analysis system measures directly and reconstructs into a current map. Engineers running hybrid bonding process control will care about this specifically: contactless excitation is the only option for measuring an unpowered, mid-process wafer stack with no accessible electrical connection.
"Our approach gives you different information than other tools," said Dr. Fleming Bruckmaier, CTO of QuantumDiamonds. "Acoustic imaging tells you whether a structure is mechanically sound. We tell you whether current is actually moving through it." A geometrically sound interconnect can still fail to carry current, a gap that structural inspection and pass/fail electrical testing each miss on their own.
The method has a trade-off. Because the microwave excitation couples into the whole field of view at once, it images everything simultaneously and cannot isolate a single trace the way biasing one pad or pin can. Contacted measurement stays the more selective tool for interrogating a known net. QD's approach is built for surveying structures with no electrical access at all, in one acquisition.
Foundries and packaging customers are now evaluating the technique on their own die- and package-level samples. QD has filed patent applications on the method and is working toward production-line throughput. The company, spun out of the Technical University of Munich in 2022, already works with nine of the ten largest semiconductor manufacturers through QDm.1 systems installed in FA labs across Europe, the United States, and Asia.
