A Study on Emission Pattern of Semiconductor ICs Using Photon Emission Microscopy

Abstract

The electronics industry has achieved a phenomenal growth over the last few decades mainly due to the rapid advances in integration technologies of semiconductor devices. At the same time, fault localization and failure identification of defects in complex integrated circuits (ICs) has become more difficult with time due to the increasing number of devices per chip. Photon emission microscopy (PEM) is a useful failure analysis technique for localizing defects by detecting photon emissions generated as a result of an electroluminescence process. The emission pattern of a faulty IC can be compared to that of a healthy one to have an idea about fault localization. The objective of this work is to generate a reference database by recording the emission patterns of various ICs under specified electrical biasing. Emission patterns of used ICs have been observed in this work using PEM, which can be used as a signature and can be compared with that of faulty ones. The procedure followed and the results of the experiment are discussed in detail.