Laser Beam Backside Probing of CMOS Integrated Circuits

We have developed a new, fully integrated circuit timing analysis tool that provides measurements of electrical waveforms by direct access to the diffusion nodes through the backside of CMOS integrated circuits. The system, known as the IDS 2000, allows the device to be driven at full speed by a wide variety of testers. Utilising an actively modelocked infrared laser beam, the system can detect waveforms with ultrahigh bandwidth (~ 10 GHz) from CMOS devices using stroboscopic sampling. The system has proven to be an powerful tool for design debug and failure analysis of flip chip packaged IC as well as any other packaged IC where the silicon side can be thinned and directly accessed. © 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.