Conditional time resolved photoemission for debugging ICs with intermittent faults

Intermittently failing IC’s are difficult to debug with techniques such as time resolved photoemission (TRE), that measure internal signals, because the measurements will contain a mixture of passing and failing behaviour. In this paper, we show that by swapping 2 BNC cables on the outside of an Emiscope II TRE instrument, it becomes possible to measure separately both the passing and failing behaviour of an intermittently failing IC. We illustrate the techniques in two case studies.