Abstract
As semiconductor technology keeps scaling down, plus new structures of transistor and new materials introduction, not only are new failure mechanisms introduced, but also old classic failure mechanisms get evolved. The obvious example of failure mechanism evolution is short defect. In the previous technologies, although short defects can happen in different layers and appear in different forms, they always happens at intra-level. As semiconductor technology advanced into nanometer regime, short defect no longer only happened in intra-level, but also more and more often happened in interlevel. Failure analysis on the inter-level short defects is much more challenging because they are usually due to interaction of two processes, such as process variation in two process steps at the same location, and often hide in the bottom of tapered and dense patterns. The conventional PFA (Physical Failure Analysis) methodology often misses discovering the defect and then the defect will be removed by subsequent polishing. This paper has demonstrated some methods to tackle the challenges with three case studies of such inter-level short defects in nanometer semiconductor technologies.
