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Resistive Random Access Memory (RRAM) can be regarded as a promising candidate on the manipulation of both electrical and magnetic properties. There is a widespread concern about the electrical manipulation of magnetic properties in RRAM devices. In our work, Co/HfO2/Pt RRAM device with magnetic conductive filament (CF) is designed and fabricated. Then the anisotropic magnetoresistance (AMR) effect...
As the development of semiconductor process, more and more advanced technologies were applied in the IC manufacturing. The device becomes more precise, and more sensitive to the minor process variation. Failure analysis challenge comes along with these advanced processes. Lithography process is one of the most critical semiconductor processes. The issue with this process has its own property. Based...
In this work, ESD immunity enhancement for the HV n-channel LDMOS with source-end discrete islands fabricated by a TSMC 0.25 μm 60 V process was investigated. An nLDMOS device always has poor ESD capability. If discrete n+ islands are formed in the source end of an nLDMOS transistor, the It2 value of this DUT is upgraded by 4.92% as compared with that of the reference nLDMOS. Meanwhile, if an nLDMOS...
A semiconductor wafer becomes the integrated circuit including many steps and ion implantation is one of the important steps. Due to wet chemicals have different etch rate for doping agent, wet stain chemical etch has shown to be an effective method in finding abnormal implant profile in the implanting area. The etch depth and profile can be used to determine implant defect in active area. In this...
In the present study, Ge2Sb2Te5 thin films have been deposited on Si (100) substrate by magnetron sputtering. We investigated microstructure and texture formation of Ge2Sb2Te5 thin films during annealing. Our characterization results show that face-centered cubic (fcc) rock-salt structure formed in 250 °C annealed thin films, and both fcc and close-packed hexagonal (hcp) structure exist in 350 °C...
In this paper, Focus Ion Beam (FIB) 3-point localization method and its applications in Failure Analysis (FA) were introduced. The FIB capability of material milling plays an important role in FA, but sometimes the target site of milling is invisible in FIB, making it impossible to do specific cross sections. With the help of the proposed 3-point localization method, most invisible targeted sites...
Ultrasonic cleaner is a workhorse in all failure analysis labs for residue removal after decapsulation or etching. In this paper, we present a novel method of ultrasonic decapsulation, where acid mixture was used in conjunction with ultrasonic agitation and was discovered to provide exceptionally high quality preservation of the surface of the copper bond wires which exceeds the quality of laser decap...
Recently, FInFET is introduced to deliver products with higher speeds and power efficiencies. Due to its 3D structure, FinFET results in complexity during the failure analysis process. Conventionally, the failure analysis (FA) starts with electrical failure analysis (EFA) to isolate the fault and follows by the physical failure analysis (PFA) to find the root cause. However, for the advanced technology,...
The effects of fast neutron radiation up to flux of 1014 cm−2 (1 MeV equivalent flux) upon the turn-on and forward static characteristics of MOS-Controlled Thyristor (MCT) are described in this work, based on physics-based 1-dimension analytical calculation and 2-dimension Silvaco simulation. It is reported for the first time that dependency of on-state specific resistance (Ron) upon neutron flux...
LIHT (Lack Injection of Hole Termination) structure is proposed and studied. Compared with conventional termination structure, the novel structure features a partial N-doped anode in the transition region and termination region instead of a whole P-doped anode. The LIHT structure stores less carries in the drift region of the transition region and termination region, in which holes concentration reduced...
Silver alloy wires with the advantage of low cost, good thermal conductivity and electrical conductivity have been adopted in packaging industry [1, 2]. For plastic encapsulated microelectronics (PEMs) conventional wet decapsulation method is widely used and is implemented by using individual acid or mix acid. However silver alloy dissolves easily in acid. In this study, we present an automatic decapping...
The solder points cracking of a component with package of ceramic ball grid array (CBGA) type is studied in the paper. The cracking cause is found and the failure mechanism is clarified. The weakness of the package structure design is demonstrated by comparing the experiment results of two kinds of components, which provides guidance for the reliable design and application.
Single Event Effects (SEE) in a stand-alone 1T1R Resistive Random Access Memory (RRAM) are experimentally demonstrated by using pulsed laser irradiation. No bit errors are observed in the RRAM array at an equivalent LET of more than 100 MeV.cm2/mg, indicating that the RRAM memory cells are robust against SEE. The most sensitive regions are the row decoders of the peripheral circuit, with a threshold...
Demand of short failure analysis has been increasing in semiconductor failure analysis. It is known from the previous studies that many short failure analysis methods are suggested. However, it is extremely difficult to identify the short failure location in recent advanced devices due to the fact of optical resolution limit. On the other hand EBAC has been noted as the high resolution method to identify...
An electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection design by using stacked diodes and silicon-controlled rectifier (SCR) as power clamp is presented to protect a K-band low-noise-amplifier in nanoscale CMOS process. Experimental results show that the proposed design can achieve higher ESD robustness without degrading the radio-frequency (RF) performance. Based on its good performances during ESD stress and...
Conductive atomic force microscopy (CAFM) was used to investigate nano-electric performances of semiconductor MOS (metal-oxide-semiconductor) devices. Due to the small tip size (as small as ∼20 nm for PtSi probes), CAFM is capable of imaging both topography and current information of nano-device structures simultaneously with very high lateral resolution. Due to the use of wide ranges of current amplifier...
Time-of-flight Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry is a well-known surface analysis technique for surface trace level contaminants due to the strength of ultra-high surface sensitivity. However, the mass spectral interpretation for useful information from thousands of elemental and molecular ions is complicated. In this paper, a simpler but effective way for the case study analysis of surface contaminant...
This paper describes the case study of test method of gate source failure and the fault localization approach with aid of device physics theory. The nominal behaviour of IGBT device is turn on the moment gate voltage reaches the threshold voltage. However, in this case the device turn on before the gate voltage reaches to the ideal threshold voltage due to distracted by Gate-source capacitance. On...
In this paper, it is reported for the first time that, in nanoscale high-k/metal-gate MOSFETs, the hot carrier degradation (HCD) follows a two-stage law in some stress conditions. Both interface traps and oxide traps contribute to HCD causing its time-dependence varies with different stress modes. The results are helpful for the physical understanding of HCD in nanoscale devices.
In this study, we establish the SDL (soft defect location) system based on the DALS module of new Hamamatsu Phemos1000 system to analyze the temperature sensitive failure. Our results show that the DALS module is a significant platform to establish the SDL system on because it can mark the defect spot synchronously with the laser scan, and with some external equipment added in, it can isolate the...
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