Front- and backside investigations of thermal and electronic properties ofsemiconducting devices

Shrinking feature sizes of electronic devices are leading to an increase of the internal electrical fields resulting in an increased hot electron gene ration. Consequently, the investigation of the resulting electrical device degradation and breakdown mechanisms gain in significance. A powerful tool for these investigations is the photon emission microscope (PEM). A disadva ntage of this technique, however, is the inability to image radiative recom bination processes which are taking place underneath metallization layers. In this paper, we will show that PEM investigations from the backside overc ome problems of failure localization caused by opaque metal contacts. A fur ther scope of this work is to compare the information which is obtained by collecting the emitted light with thermal properties like failure induced h ot spots inside a device. This thermal characterization is carried out with a scanning thermal microscope (SThM), which is used for the localization o f failures in integrated 3 devices and for backside measurements on thinned substrates. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.