Electrical characterization by sub-micron probing technique on 90nm CMOS technology for failure analysis

As the failure mechanism becomes more complex with IC technology progression, the Failure Analysis (FA) needs electrical characterization of die internal transistor to fault identification and discrimination of various defect types. The Sub-Micron Probing (SMP) with 4 needles allows all electrical characteristics measurements of single transistor and leads to accurate results in FA with a best root cause understanding. This paper presents the effectiveness of the 4 needles-SMP technique and reports experimental results during the threshold voltage/BVDSS measurements of the 6 transistors of RAM cell on a 90nm CMOS technology in the Nice Device Analysis Laboratory (NDAL) of Texas Instruments France.