Intra-gate fault diagnosis of CMOS integrated circuits

Thesis



Knowing the root cause of why an Integrated Circuit (1C) device fails to function properly is the key to provide the corrective measures to increase the yield and shorten the time to market. In recent years, electrical fault diagnosis method has received growing attention due to the effective and indispensable guiding role it plays in modern fault localization practice when physical measures are more and more confined by the shrinking feature size and condensed internal structure.

While most of the fault diagnosis tools are based on gate level fault models, many faults are actually at the transistor level (the intra-gate fault). This thesis provides an innovative method to diagnose the intra-gate faults. It covers a wide range of different types of intra-gate faults. The method extends the capability of gate level fault diagnosis tools to the intra-gate domain by building connections with these intra-gate faults to particular types of gate level faults. Intra-gate faults are transformed to gate level representations so that they can be diagnosed directly by the widely available and well developed gate level diagnosis tools. Real diagnosis of intra-gate faults from wafer data and physical failure analysis photos are provided as solid proofs of the effectiveness of this method.

Authors: Fan, X; Fan, Xinyue

• Publication date: 2006
• DOI: 10.5287/ora-kqgzqqk82
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Subjects: Fault tolerance; Integrated circuits