High-Resolution Short-Circuit Fault Localization in a Multi-Layer Integrated Circuit using a Quantum Diamond Microscope

TL;DR

This paper explores the use of a quantum diamond microscope for high-resolution magnetic imaging to locate short-circuit faults in complex multi-layer integrated circuits, demonstrating its potential as a powerful failure analysis tool.

Contribution

It introduces a novel application of quantum diamond microscopy for fault localization in multi-layer ICs, highlighting its high resolution and sensitivity advantages.

Findings

QDM effectively detects faults in multi-layer silicon dies.

QDM can identify faults deep within chip stacks.

The technique offers high spatial resolution and robustness.

Abstract

As integrated circuit (IC) geometry and packaging become more sophisticated with ongoing fabrication and design innovations, the electrical engineering community needs increasingly-powerful failure analysis (FA) methods to meet the growing troubleshooting challenges of multi-layer (with multiple metal layers) and multi-chip components. In this work, we investigate a new electronics FA method using a quantum diamond microscope (QDM) to image the magnetic fields from short-circuit faults. After quantifying the performance by detecting short-circuit faults in a multi-layer silicon die, we assess how a QDM would detect faults in a heterogeneously integrated (HI) die stack. This work establishes QDM-based magnetic imaging as a competitive technique for electronics FA, offering high spatial resolution, high sensitivity, and robust instrumentation. We anticipate these advantages to be especially useful for finding faults deep within chip-stack ICs with many metal layers, optically-opaque layers, or optically-scattering layers.