Diagnosis meets physical failure analysis: how long can we succeed?

Detecting real defects, increases the fabrication facility's urgency to eliminate the source of the defect and gives assurance to the customer that the quality enhancement process is in action. Such satisfying moments may be more and more rare, however, as challenges to the physical failure analysis process make it increasingly difficult to get such pictures and as failure modes themselves become less amenable to the same. As challenges to physical failure analysis increasingly relegate it to a sampling/verification role, opportunities such as innovative use of process monitors and test structures and circuit-behavior/simulation-based pointers to failure root cause must increasingly be exploited and increasingly trusted as high-fidelity guide to yield learning.