Abstract Tiny circuit design reliability issue related to competitive signal was investigated in a sense amplifier (SA) circuitry of SRAM by E-Beam probing technique in this paper. The irregular output signals then traced back to former stage circuit and identified associated waveforms. With such design concept and technique tracing, the invisible and cunning circuit mismatch reliability issue could be revealed successfully.

Abstract Shallow junction formation in silicon chips is a hot topic in the semiconductor industry. Reduction of power consumption of integrated circuits and an increase of the device performance would drastically reduce the sizes of circuits and, therefore, would necessitate a similar reduction for the depth of the p-n junctions. This paper performed the flash lamp annealing process application, applied to the CMOS as alternative method to attain the goal of shallow junction in the case. A marginal thermal budget mismatch related failure mode was revealed and explained.

Abstract The passive voltage contrast (PVC) in this experiment was widely used to detect open/short issues for most failure analyses. However, most of back-end particles were visible, but front-end particles were not. And sometimes only used PVC image, the failure mechanism was un-imaginable. As a result, we needed to collect some electrical data to explain complex PVC image, before physical failure analysis (PFA) was started. This paper shows how to use the scanning probe microscope (SPM) tool to make up PVC method and overcome the physical failure analysis challenge. From our experiment, the C-AFM could provide more information of the defect type and give faster feedback to production lines.