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

As the failure mechanisms become more complex with IC technology progression, the failure analysis (FA) needs electrical characterization of die internal transistors to fault identification and discrimination of various defect types. The sub-micron probing (SMP) with 4 needles allows all electrical characteristics measurements of a 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 90 nm CMOS technology in the Nice Device Analysis Laboratory (NDAL) of Texas Instruments France.