This work presents a new photon emission microscopy camera prototype for the acquisition of intrinsic light emitted from VLSI circuits during their normal operation. This novel camera was designed to be sensitive to longer wavelengths in order to maximize the signal intensities from modern VLSI chips which are characterized by a red shift in the intrinsic emission spectrum. In this paper, we will characterize the performance of the camera using 32 nm and 22 nm SOI chips. The novel camera is able to collect emission images with the circuit under test operating at a supply voltage down to 0.5 V, exceeding the performance of a state-of-the-art InGaAs camera.

This work presents a comparison of two generations of Superconducting nanowire Single-Photon Detector (SnSPD) prototypes used for Time-Resolved Emission (TRE) measurements from VLSI chips. The performance of the systems is compared in order to understand the figures of merit that a single-photon detector should have to enable the acquisition of time resolved emission waveforms for ultra-low voltage applications. We will show that measurements down to a new World record low 0.4 V supply voltage were made possible by a careful optimization of the detector front-end electronics. We also characterized the emission from devices with different threshold voltages in order to understand how the emission contributions depend on this parameter and how this affects the resulting waveform SNR.

As feature sizes in integrated circuits (ICs) become smaller, higher-resolution defect detection and failure analysis techniques are required. The introduction of solid immersion lenses (SIL) has been an enabling technology for highresolution backside IC imaging. High Numerical Aperture (NA) SIL imaging introduces properties of focused light which cannot be predicted by scalar beam optics. For example, spatial resolution can be manipulated in selected directions by modification of the polarization direction in linearly polarized light. In this work, we propose a unified framework combining multiple SIL microscopy images collected using polarizations at different directions in order to improve image reconstruction performance and ultimately resolution and defect localization. We show improvement in reconstruction quality by combining data taken using light with multiple polarizations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework on experimental data.