An automated electro-optic probing system for ultra-high-speed IC's

This paper describes an automated optical probing system based on external electro-optic sampling for the internal diagnoses of ultra-high-speed IC's. A workstation-controlled environment, automatic probe positioner, and module-based system architecture make the system easy to use, and improve measurement accuracy and reproducibility. Voltage sensitivity is routinely obtained on an order of 1 mV//spl radic/(Hz) at frequencies up to 70 GHz. The system has been successfully applied to the internal-node measurement of on-wafer digital IC's operating at 20 Gb/s.<
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