Failure analysis of IC contains FinFET

Recently, FInFET is introduced to deliver products with higher speeds and power efficiencies. Due to its 3D structure, FinFET results in complexity during the failure analysis process. Conventionally, the failure analysis (FA) starts with electrical failure analysis (EFA) to isolate the fault and follows by the physical failure analysis (PFA) to find the root cause. However, for the advanced technology, the size of the circuit elements is scaled. The EFA result just provides a rough location of the failure. Sometimes, further fault isolation down to the transistor is needed, which can be achieved via nanoprobing, conductive atomic force microscope (C-AFM) or passive voltage contrast (PVC). For the final step of PFA in the FinFET case, planar sample preparation for transmission microscope (PV-TEM) is conducted firstly to reveal the possible failure location and followed by the cross sectional sample preparation for transmission microscopy (XTM) at the same location to reveal the actual root cause. In this presentation, failure analysis cases of ICs contain FinFET are demonstrated.