Advanced thermal failure analysis and reliability investigations – Industrial demands and related limitations

The thermal interaction between actively operated integrated circuits and applied characterization tools is one of the most important ones within failure analysis (FA) and reliability/methodology (RM) investigations. Hereby different kind of thermal interaction mechanisms can be utilized, whereas these mechanisms have to be separated for instance into classes with respect to thermal excitation and/or detection, spatial limitations, and underlying physical principle. Although they all have in common the capability to link the thermo-electric device characteristic to a representing output signal, they have to be interpreted in completely different ways. Therefore, within this paper we discuss from a practical engineering point of view established FA/RM characterization techniques by means of infrared-lock in thermography (IR-LIT) and thermal induced voltage alteration (TIVA) case studies as well as the capability of non established ones like scanning thermal microscopy (SThM), thermal reflectance microscopy (TRM), and time domain thermal reflectance (TDTR). Hereby we focus on the complementarities of the methods for localization and characterization as well as on the according industrial demands and related limitations.