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Electron beam absorbed current (EBAC) has been used to isolate defects in BEOL metal stacks. With the increasing layout complexity, metal signal lines often run over 100um area and over multiple metal stacks. This makes SEM inspections during polishing tedious, time consuming and easy to overlook the defect. With the EBAC technique, it often shows the entire routing of the signal line with additional...
With rapid developments in semiconductor manufacturing technologies, new and more complicated challenges emerge in the Failure Analysis space. The real challenge arises when similar electrical data is obtained from transistor nano-probing from completely different defect types. Accurate data interpretation is therefore the key to unraveling and understanding the root causes of failure. This paper...
With rapid developments in semiconductor manufacturing technologies, new and more complicated challenges emerge in the Failure Analysis space. It has been a challenge to perform failure analysis for voltage-sensitive soft failures, especially those occurring in SRAM circuitries. However, fault localization in sub-micron devices is successful if existing FA techniques are innovatively and extensively...
Back-side die polishing for thinning silicon uniformly to less than 100 µm is challenging due to sample warpage issues. A novel method involving back-side die polishing at elevated temperature has been used to minimize warpage of the sample during the actual milling process. The optimized process achieves highly uniform silicon thickness across the whole die. High-resolution laser images can be obtained...
In semiconductor companies, failure analysis (FA) activities play a major role in all many areas. FA is deeply involved in new process technology development, 1st Silicon bring-up, wafer sort and backend yield improvement, product qualification and customer return analysis.
Failure analysis plays a major role in all areas of the semiconductor company especially during product development cycle, 1st silicon stage, or in wafer processes and fabrication as well as assembly and package development. Different companies have different FA flows but all FA steps will need to start with fault isolation. Fault isolation is the step to narrow down the focus area of a failing component...
Absorbed-specimen current imaging forms an image based on the electron current signal absorbed by the specimen when the primary electron beam scans across the specimen in the scanning electron microscopy (SEM). This method combined is mainly used to localize resistive or open contact/via sites in a multi-layer silicon-on-insulator (SOI) microprocessor chip. The major benefit of absorbed-current imaging...
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