Accelerated Hierarchical Netlist Correlation Between I/O Failures and Emission Sites in Advanced Process Nodes
Accelerated Hierarchical Netlist Correlation Between I/O Failures and Emission Sites in Advanced Process Nodes
Wednesday, October 7, 2026: 10:00 AM
Summary:
Electrical failure analysis (EFA) of mixed-signal I/O in advanced nodes requires correlating emission sites—observed via lock-in thermography (LIT), photon emission microscopy (PEM), or lock-in static laser stimulation (L-SLS)—to failing top-level I/O pins, despite sources often being deeply embedded within hierarchical circuitry. Manual tracing is labor-intensive due to complex hierarchy, ambiguous naming, and passive interconnects. This work presents a method to determine static electrical connectivity between a source net and a target device or instance using typed connectivity relations and a staged solver. The solver incrementally expands the search space while constraining exploration through hierarchical alias resolution, resistor terminal expansion, lowest common ancestor (LCA) identification, and bounded device-terminal traversal, terminating upon finding an intersection or exhausting valid paths. The method produces an explicit, ordered sequence of hierarchical nets and instances, enabling efficient and deterministic correlation between physical emission observations and electrical failure points.
Electrical failure analysis (EFA) of mixed-signal I/O in advanced nodes requires correlating emission sites—observed via lock-in thermography (LIT), photon emission microscopy (PEM), or lock-in static laser stimulation (L-SLS)—to failing top-level I/O pins, despite sources often being deeply embedded within hierarchical circuitry. Manual tracing is labor-intensive due to complex hierarchy, ambiguous naming, and passive interconnects. This work presents a method to determine static electrical connectivity between a source net and a target device or instance using typed connectivity relations and a staged solver. The solver incrementally expands the search space while constraining exploration through hierarchical alias resolution, resistor terminal expansion, lowest common ancestor (LCA) identification, and bounded device-terminal traversal, terminating upon finding an intersection or exhausting valid paths. The method produces an explicit, ordered sequence of hierarchical nets and instances, enabling efficient and deterministic correlation between physical emission observations and electrical failure points.