Dynamic hot-electron emission using time-resolved photon counting can address the long-term failure analysis and debug requirements of the semiconductor industry's advanced devices. This article identifies the detector performance parameters and components that are required to scale and keep pace with the industry's requirements. It addresses the scalability of dynamic emission with the semiconductor advanced device roadmap. It is important to understand the limitations to determining that a switching event has occurred. The article explains the criteria for event detection, which is suitable for tracking signal propagation and looking for logic or other faults in which timing is not critical. It discusses conditions for event timing, whose goal is to determine accurately when a switching event has occurred, usually for speed path analysis. One of the uses of a dynamic emission system is to identify faults by studying the emission as a general function of time.

Time-resolved photon emission has been shown to be useful in analyzing clock skews and timing-related defects in flip-chip devices. In practice, time-resolved photon emission using the S-25 Quantar detector cannot be used at long loop lengths (typically >10 μs). This paper discusses a near-infrared (NIR) optimized time-resolved emission system to demonstrate that even with long loop lengths time-resolved photon emission can be extremely useful for defect localization. Specifically, it describes time-resolved photon emission system, and shows how time-resolved photon emission was used to solve two different issues that caused scan fails on silicon-on-insulator devices, and briefly discusses the interpretation of optical waveforms. The two issues are presented as case studies.

Commonly used timing measurement tools are often limited to probing a circuit running at one single frequency [1,2]. In reality, multiple frequencies may be present on chip, and that can lead to timing problems which render the chip inoperable within certain frequency ranges. We will describe a simple modification to a Picosecond Imaging Circuit Analysis (PICA [3]) instrumentation whih permits the simultaneous measurement of timing in multiple frequency domains.

Hot-carrier luminescence emission is used to diagnose the cause of excess quiescence current, IDDQ, in a low power circuit implemented in CMOS 7SF technology. We found by optical inspection of the chip that the high IDDQ is related to the low threshold, Vt, device process and in particular to transistors with minimum channel length (0.18 μm). In this paper we will also show that it is possible to gain knowledge regarding the operating conditions of the IC from the analysis of optical emission due to leakage current, aside from simply locating defects and failures. In particular, we will show how it is possible to calculate the voltage drop across the circuit power grid from time-integrated acquisitions of leakage luminescence.

This paper presents the first single element time resolved emission (TRE) data collected from microprocessors fabricated with 0.13 µm process silicon using tester loop lengths, and in many cases acquisition times, comparable to laser voltage probing. The data presented here demonstrate that TRE tools with highly sensitive single element detectors can be used for practical microprocessor circuit diagnostics with reasonable acquisition times.

A number of backside analysis techniques rely on the successful use of optical beams in performing backside fault isolation. In this paper, the authors have investigated the influence of the 1340 nm and 1064 nm laser wavelength on advanced CMOS transistor performance.

Time-resolved photon emission (TRPE) results, obtained using a new superconducting, single-photon detector (SSPD) are reported. Detection efficiency (DE) for large area detectors has recently been improved by >100x without affecting SSPDs inherently low jitter (≈30 ps) and low dark-count rate (<30 s-1). TRPE measurements taken from a 0.13 μm geometry CMOS IC are presented. A single laser, time-differential probing scheme that is being investigated for next-generation laser voltage probing (LVP) is also discussed. This new scheme is designed to have shot-noise-limited performance, allowing signals as small as 100 parts-per-million (ppm) to be reliably measured.