Introduction

Failure analysis can be defined as a diagnostic process for determining the cause of a failure. It has broad applications in various industries but is particularly important in the integrated circuit industry. Within the semiconductor industry, failure analysis is a term broadly applied to a number of diagnostic activities. These activities are geared towards to supporting the determination of a “root cause” of failure, which support process improvements impacting product yield, quality and reliability. In its most narrow usage, failure analysis is the analysis of completed semiconductor devices, which have failed. These consist primarily of customer returns, qualification failures and engineering evaluations. In the broadest sense, failure analysis includes a diverse range of diagnostic activities, which include support of process development, design debug, and yield improvement activities in the both the wafer fab and assembly site. Despite the broad range of diagnostic activities, a relatively common set of tools and techniques has emerged to support them. However, nearly all of the extremely diverse group of the tools and techniques are used in the failure analysis of completed devices. Because of this, the failure analysis of completed devices provides an excellent perspective to approach a discussion of these tools and techniques.