An anodic etching is used for silicon junction profile delineation. Experimental results show that the etching rate is determined by dopant type, of which P type silicon etching rate will be enhanced while the N type silicon become inactive when an external positive voltage is applied. The experiment verifies the role of holes on the silicon etching. The proposed method is applicable for exploring the profile of P+/N-well, N+/P-well, and N-well/P-well junctions, using the same recipe.

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.

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.