Low Power and Fault Isolation: Spectral Aspects of Photon Emission

Photon emission (PE), for decades the most important technique for Contactless Fault Isolation (CFI) in microelectronics debug and failure analysis, has fallen short of recent IC technologies with respect to optical probing techniques like EOFM/EOP that seemed to be much more sensitive to lower supply voltage operation. This investigation explains why PE can remain a very useful complimentary CFI technique also in low voltage regime if efforts are taken for signal sensitivity on the infrared side of the emission spectrum. The experiments tell that even with InGaAs detectors, supply voltages down to almost 0.5V can be measured. With detectors of a spectral range towards even lower photon energies, PE will be sensitive to much smaller voltages. The gain of device information that PE can deliver, especially if evaluated spectrally, will be available to the advantage of FA and debug of FinFET technologies.