Electron Beam Absorbed Current as a means of locating metal defectivity on 45nm SOI technology

In order to keep pace with the increasing number of transistors within the modern microprocessor, it has become necessary to use ten or more levels of back end metallization as interconnect. During the failure analysis of such products it is common to encounter instances of defectivity in the metallization used to route internal signals to different areas of the die. Typical defect mechanisms can be caused by issues during fabrication such as contamination, metal patterning defects, resistive interconnects or other longer term problems such as electromigration.