Front- and backside investigations of thermal and electronic properties of semiconducting devices

Shrinking feature sizes of electronic devices are leading to an increase of the internal electrical fields resulting in an increased hot electron generation. Consequently, the investigation of the resulting electrical device degradation and breakdown mechanisms gain in significance. A powerful tool for these investigations is the photon emission microscope (PEM). A disadvantage of this technique, however, is the inability to image radiative recombination processes which are taking place underneath metallization layers. In this paper, we will show that PEM investigations from the backside overcome problems of failure localization caused by opaque metal contacts. A further scope of this work is to compare the information which is obtained by collecting the emitted light with thermal properties like failure induced hot spots inside a device. This thermal characterization is carried out with a scanning thermal microscope (SThM), which is used for the localization of failures in integrated devices and for backside measurements on thinned substrates. © 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.