Advanced Diagnosis Techniques for sub-μm Integrated Circuits

Following existing trends in microelectronics increasing demands are put on the performance of chip-internal signal measurement techniques. As the tools for circuit design and simulation are improving steadily design errors on first silicon are becoming rare, however, they reflect more subtle circuit problems which call for highly accurate measurements. Beside the electron beam tester, which is a well established instrument for chip internal signal measurements on micrometer scale lines, recently other non-contact testing methods have been developed which offer improvements for specific aspects like measurement bandwidth, access to internal nodes and also spatial resolution. With regard to the analysis of future integrated circuits the performance and limitations of those advanced techniques are put into perspective.