Certain device failures are especially difficult to analyze since they can only be reproduced under high speed and high power conditions, while also requiring the removal of standard heat dissipating packaging to get visual access to the chip. In addition to the challenge of heat generation density of devices increasing year by year, small hot spots in actual usage generate heat far in excess of the average, and heat dissipation performance needs to be more efficient and highly uniform. In addition, it is desirable to implement a cooling system that does not overly restrict the number and types of lenses that can be used, such as high and low magnification air gap lenses as well as a solid-immersion lens, which has been one of the challenges of existing systems. This paper reports on the development of a cooling system to address these challenges and to enable failure analysis on a device running at 200 W.

In the failure analysis of semiconductors, layout analysis to pick up suspect nets is getting to be a time consuming work due to finer wiring pitch and multi-layer structure. This article proposes a failure analysis navigation system (FA-Navigation System), which can make it easier to extract the nets passing through the signals detected by the hardware analysis tool, such as emission microscopes or OBIRCH analysis tools. It introduces the functions of the system and shows some case studies in actual failure analyses. The IDDQ fault diagnosis is especially useful for case studies. The result of the software diagnosis can be loaded in the analysis window of the FA-navigation system, and the system correlates the result to the nets extracted by the hardware analysis and displays coincident nets in a sorted manner to make the failure analysis easier.