Front-and backside investigations of thermal and electronic properties of semiconducting devices

摘要

Shrinking feature sizes of electronic devices are leading to an increase of the internal electrical fields resulting in an increased hot electron generation. Consequently, the investigaton of the resulting electrical device degradation and breakdown mechanisms gain in significance. A powerful tool for these investigatons is the photon emission microscope (PEM). Adisadvantage of this technique, however, is the inability to image radiative recombination processes which are taking place underneath metallization layers. In this paper, we will show that PEM investigaton from the backside overcome problems of failure localization caused by opaque metal contacts. A further scope of this work is to compare the information which is obtained by collecting the emitted light wiht thermal properties like failure induced hot spots inside a device. This thermal charactrerization is carried out with a scanning thermal microscope (SThM), which is used for the localization of failures in integrated devices adn for backside measurements on thinned substrates.