Effectiveness of Photon Emission Microscopy in identifying intrinsic device reliability issues and aiding design debug
Effectiveness of Photon Emission Microscopy in identifying intrinsic device reliability issues and aiding design debug
Tuesday, November 18, 2025: 12:50 PM
2 (Pasadena Convention Center)
Summary:
Photon Emission Microscopy (PEM) is a popular failure analysis technique capable of detecting photons emitted from defective circuitry and helps pinpoint the failure location. This technique has helped identify open defects, polysilicon gate defects, gate oxide-related failures, electrostatic discharge failures, metallization failures, logic state detection, memory bit failures, and leakage failures. In this paper, we discuss how photon emission microscopy can be a valuable tool in identifying and understanding intrinsic device reliability issues. We discuss how emission intensity, obtained by post-processing the photon emission image with a Python imaging script and open-source computer vision libraries, can provide a relative quantification of the number of trapped charges compared to the leakage observed over time of the applied stress. We also discuss how PEM could help understand the design-process interaction of various IPs in a microelectronic chip through case studies. We also discuss how the sensitivity of photon emission microscopy can aid design debugging by identifying vulnerabilities in the design that could directly influence the future tape-outs of a product.
Photon Emission Microscopy (PEM) is a popular failure analysis technique capable of detecting photons emitted from defective circuitry and helps pinpoint the failure location. This technique has helped identify open defects, polysilicon gate defects, gate oxide-related failures, electrostatic discharge failures, metallization failures, logic state detection, memory bit failures, and leakage failures. In this paper, we discuss how photon emission microscopy can be a valuable tool in identifying and understanding intrinsic device reliability issues. We discuss how emission intensity, obtained by post-processing the photon emission image with a Python imaging script and open-source computer vision libraries, can provide a relative quantification of the number of trapped charges compared to the leakage observed over time of the applied stress. We also discuss how PEM could help understand the design-process interaction of various IPs in a microelectronic chip through case studies. We also discuss how the sensitivity of photon emission microscopy can aid design debugging by identifying vulnerabilities in the design that could directly influence the future tape-outs of a product.