Resolving Failures with Invalid Emission Site Through Bench Tests Results Evaluation with in-depth Circuit Analysis and Micro-probing

Failure analysis is a very important discipline in many branches of industry, including semiconductor manufacturing, where it is used in design debug of new products or in yield improvement of existing products. Photon emission microscopy is a widely used fault localization technique in failure analysis, such as on a functional failure device, where the failure mode can only be replicated from bench testing. However, fault localization by emission microscopy does not always detect an emission site at the defect location. In many cases, induced emission spots are observed. Thus, further failure isolation through in-depth correlation of bench test evaluation results, circuit analysis and micro-probing is needed. This paper presents a case study demonstrating the use of these techniques.