P. Egger, S. Müller, M. Stiftinger, Infineon Technologies AG, Munich, Germany

Summary: With shrinking feature size of integrated circuits traditional FA techniques like SEM inspection of top down delayered devices or cross sectioning often cannot visualize the physical root cause anymore. Especially inside SRAM blocks with their aggressive design rules a shift of transistor parameter can cause a local mismatch and therefore a soft fail of a single SRAM cell. This paper will present a new approach to identify a physical root cause with the help of nano probing and TCAD simulation and allows the wafer fab to implement countermeasures.