Improving Defect Localization Accuracy by means of Effect-Cause Intra-Cell Diagnosis at Transistor Level
Abstract
Logic diagnosis is the process of isolating possible sources of observed errors in a defective circuit, so that physical failure analysis can be performed to determine the root cause of such errors. Thus, effective and accurate logic diagnosis is crucial to speed up physical failure analysis process and eventually to improve the yield. In this paper, we propose a new intra-cell diagnosis method based on the "Effect-Cause" approach to improve the defect localization accuracy. The proposed approach is based on the Critical Path Tracing here applied at transistor level. It leads to a more precise localization of the root cause of observed errors compared to state-of-the-art diagnosis approaches. Experimental results show the efficiency of our approach.