Device and interconnect electrical failures often occur in the form of
short or open circuits which produce hot or cold spots under voltage
bias. With the minimum device feature size shrinking to 0.25 mu m and
less, it is impossible to locate the exact position of defects by trad
itional thermal or optical techniques such as infra-red emission therm
ometry. Liquid crystals or optical beam induced current. We have used
a temperature-sensing probe in an atomic force microscope to locate a
hot spot created by a short-circuit defect between the gate and the dr
ain of a Si-MOSFET with a spatial resolution of about 0.5 mu m. The te
chnique has the potential to produce spatial resolutions in the range
of 0.05 mu m and efforts are underway to reach this goal.