Precision Xe Plasma FIB Delayering for Physical Failure Analysis of sub-20 nm Microprocessor Devices
Precision Xe Plasma FIB Delayering for Physical Failure Analysis of sub-20 nm Microprocessor Devices
Thursday, November 9, 2017: 11:05 AM
Ballroom C (Pasadena Convention Center)
Summary:
Deprocessing is an essential step in the physical failure analysis of ICs. Typically this is accomplished by techniques such as wet chemical methods, RIE and mechanical manual polishing. Manual polishing suffers from highly non-uniform delayering particularly for sub-20nm technologies due to aggressive back-end-of-line (BEOL) scaling and porous ultra low-k dielectric films. Recently gas assisted Xe plasma FIB has demonstrated uniform delayering of the metal and dielectric layers achieving a planar surface of heterogeneous materials. In this paper, we present the successful application of this technique to delayer sub-20 nm microprocessor chips with real defects to root cause the failure.
Deprocessing is an essential step in the physical failure analysis of ICs. Typically this is accomplished by techniques such as wet chemical methods, RIE and mechanical manual polishing. Manual polishing suffers from highly non-uniform delayering particularly for sub-20nm technologies due to aggressive back-end-of-line (BEOL) scaling and porous ultra low-k dielectric films. Recently gas assisted Xe plasma FIB has demonstrated uniform delayering of the metal and dielectric layers achieving a planar surface of heterogeneous materials. In this paper, we present the successful application of this technique to delayer sub-20 nm microprocessor chips with real defects to root cause the failure.