Enabling Cell Aware Diagnosis in a Foundry for Accurate and Efficient Failure Analysis of Cell Internal Defects

Cell aware diagnosis identifies defects within the standard cell as opposed to traditional layout aware diagnosis that identifies the failing standard cell or the area between two standard cells. In a mature technology dominated by random defects, cell aware results pinpoint the cell internal layer drastically reducing the turnaround time for failure analysis. This paper describes a method to enable cell aware diagnosis in a foundry environment, perform a volume diagnosis analysis with RCAD (fail mode pareto) and drive failure analysis with a quick turnaround time for a 14nm customer chip.