4DS - Anything but Charting, page-25578

I think IMEC were probably as surprised as the rest of us that PL3 is non functional.

The oxidation issue is the sort of thing these guys would have dealt with before and the development of an etch would have been based on prior experience in chip fabrication. "Oh that's happened - go away and give us an etch and we'll incorporate it into the PL3 design"

The fact that it went on to render the underlying cells inoperable would have been a turn up for the books. But that's what happens when you're engineering at the edge I guess.

What I find hard to get my head around is that IMEC, playing at these limits, with cutting edge fab methods and structures, would not spend a bit of time conducting their own functional testing - after all, what they learn may have application on another project (provided no IP is being breached) - that's the raison d'etre for a facility like IMEC.