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

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.