An automated approach to isolate dominant SER susceptibilities in microcircuits

With the ever decreasing feature sizes of modern integrated circuits (IC), new test and analysis approaches are needed to isolate dominant soft error rate (SER) susceptibilities. A new test capability which provides SER raster scanning of microcircuits with a collimated heavy-ion beam, having spatial isolation as small as 10 microns, is presented. The system termed the Milli-Beam™ provides, through post processing, three-dimensional surface plots showing the location of error counts over an entire IC. A new cross section measurement technique that accounts for beam variations and uncertainties independent of laboratory dosimetry is also presented.