Pushing Failure Mode Stimulus to Overcome the Limitations and Boundaries of Soft Defect Localization Tools

Dynamic analysis by laser stimulation (DALS) is a method used to analyze temperature-dependent failures. There are cases, however, where the laser alone cannot get devices hot enough to induce an observable change in behavior. This paper examines three such cases and describes how analysts were able to induce and diagnose the underlying failure by using external signals, complex triggering, and resistive heating to compensate for limitations in laser power.