As the Internet of Things, smart factories and autonomous driving increase the demand for low-price radar sensors, the authors address this need by developing a 24 GHz short range radar in standard bulk silicon CMOS technology for mass market production. CMOS technology enables cost reduction and efficient system integration compared to former GaAs and current SiGe solutions. Design for failure analysis (DFFA) is implemented in the low-noise amplifier (LNA) of the radar to identify and compensate process deviations. It consists of scalable capacitor structures and is executed using focused ion beam circuit edit. By doing so, the design specifications of high gain and low noise of the LNA are reliably met at high yield for the desired operating frequency. The presented DFFA method enables a shift in peak gain by 2.5 GHz. It thereby improves gain and noise figure at 24 GHz by 2 dB and -0.2 dB respectively. The resulting optimized LNA achieves a gain of 20 dB and a noise figure of 3.7 dB matching and surpassing other state-of-the-art works in a single prototyping run.

The visible approach of optical Contactless Fault Isolation (VIS-CFI) serves the perspective of application in FinFET technologies of 10 nm nodes and smaller. A solid immersion lens (SIL) is mandatory to obtain a proper resolution. A VISCFI setup with SIL requires a global polishing process for sub-10 µm silicon thickness. This work is the first to combine all these necessary components for high resolution VIS-CFI in one successful experiment. We demonstrate Laser Voltage Imaging and Probing (LVI, LVP) on 16/14 nm technology devices and investigate a focus depth dependence of the LVI/LVP measurement in FinFETs.

Programmable logics, such as complex programmable logic devices (CPLDs) and field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), are widely used in security applications. In these applications cryptographic ciphers, physically unclonable functions (PUFs) and other security primitives are implemented on such platforms. These security primitives can be the target of fault injection attacks. One of the most powerful examples of fault injection techniques is laser fault injection (LFI), which can induce permanent or transient faults into the configuration memories of programmable logic. However, localization of fault sensitive locations on the chip requires reverse-engineering of the utilized building blocks, and therefore, is a tedious task. In this work, we propose an automated technique using readily available IC debug tools to map and profile the fault sensitive locations of programmable logic devices in a short period.

This work is a unique solution for enhancing optical failure analysis and optical signal transmission. Optical failure analysis remains to be a vital part of the analysis process, despite shrinking feature sizes and challenging package technologies. The presented optical signal transmission supports the development of photonic integrated circuits. The key component is a Focused Ion Beam (FIB) process which shapes optical lenses out of the sample material leading to an improvement in lateral resolution and signal transmission. Two cases are shown that demonstrate these improvements. The first case is an optical backside analysis in a spatially confined opening of a package where other Solid Immersion Lens (SIL) systems could not be applied. It offers an improvement in spatial resolution by a factor of 2, down to a FWHM of 387 nm. The second case is a novel application for FIB shaped lenses aiming at photonic integrated circuits. This lens is created out of the isolating frontside and improves the grating coupler efficiency by a factor of 4.1.