On July 1st, Toshiba Corporation's Semiconductor Company and Storage Products Company consolidated to form Semiconductor & Storage Products Company.This page describes reliability information of semiconductor products.

Single Element Failure Analysis using a Nanoprobe System

[As of April, 2011]

Purpose
Direct contact was made with the electrode of the single transistor in the LSI and the electrical characteristics of the element were measured using a nanoprobe system. An investigation was conducted regarding the presence or absence of failure based on voltage - current characteristics and, by conducting comparisons with normal elements, the variance in characteristics caused by the failure. Although conventional technology requires preparation of a terminal for characteristics measurement by FIB processing, this system obtains element characteristics in a short period of time without resulting in damage.
Analysis
The characteristics of the EEPROM write failure cell were measured using the nanoprobe system.
Result
The faulty cell transistor's voltage - current characteristics between the substrate and the gate terminal used for data maintenance were compared with those of a normal cell transistor, resulting in the discovery that the leak current flowed from low voltage, thereby deteriorating write characteristics and causing poor data maintainability.

This is [Figure 1 Photograph of Probe Terminal Tip of Nanoprobe System (Tip Diameter: 50nm)].

Figure 1 Photograph of Probe Terminal Tip of Nanoprobe System (Tip Diameter: 50nm)

This is [Figure 2 Voltage - Current Characteristics of Gate Terminal (Defective and Normal Cell Comparison)].

Figure 2 Voltage - Current Characteristics of Gate Terminal
(Defective and Normal Cell Comparison)

Note 1: Bibliography. Ryu:Electrical evaluation using AFP(Atomic Force Probe) and physical analysis for LSI devices

Note 2: Bibliography. Ryu,Todome:Application of AFP to failure analysis for LSI devices