Abstract This work presents the first application of a diagnosis driven approach for identifying systematic chain fail defects in order to reduce the time spent in failure analysis. The zonal analysis methodology that is applied separates devices into systematic and random populations of chain fails in order to prevent submitting random defects for failure analysis. Two silicon case studies are presented to validate the production worthiness of diagnosis driven yield analysis for chain fails. The defects uncovered in these case studies are very subtle and would be difficult to identify with any other methodology.

Abstract In this paper, we describe a silicon debug flow that uses debug-friendly scan test patterns to improve the efficiency of physical fault isolation of timing failures using time-resolved emission (TRE) system. Several techniques have been developed to generate the debug-friendly test patterns. We further show a silicon debug case of a 90nm design based on the proposed debug flow.