An innovative gate oxide characterization technique in the failure analysis of 0.13/spl mu/m process technology based MOSFET device

In the present study, failure analysis was carried out to determine the failure mechanism of the 0.13/spl mu/m process technology based microprocessor product that failed leakage test at production test floor, after constant voltage stress in the burn-in ovens. This follows by an innovative physical characterization technique to provide significant insights to the root-cause analysis of gate oxide breakdown induced failure by combining both wet chemical etching and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) on the same sample. While wet chemical etch is used to confirm gate oxide breakdown as the failure mechanism, TEM is employed to characterize the transformation of silicon substrate crystal structure through a novel TEM sample preparation technique.