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Copper (Cu) wirebond technology in IC packaging has become popular these days due to its better characteristic and cost compare to Gold (Au). Nonetheless, failure analysis remains to be very challenging as Cu is easily dissolved when it is reacted with fuming nitric acid used during standard decapsulation process. Hence, by utilizing enhanced manual decapsulation technique with mixture of fuming nitric acid and concentrated sulfuric acid at low temperature, successful Cu wire package decapsulation happen to be reproducible mainly for die level failure analysis purposes.

This paper demonstrates the utilization of the C-AFM to study and identify the electrical characteristic of SRAM high resistance failure in CMOS process. After taking electrical measurement, cross-section TEM together with CD measurement to reveal and understand the physical root cause of the electrical failure is reported.

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The application of the conductive atomic force microscope (C-AFM) has been widely reported as a useful method of failure analysis in semiconductor field of nanometer scale science and technology, [1] Especially for hard failure and soft failure identification and localization at logic and SRAM in CMOS process. This paper will demonstrate a new application of the C-AFM to identify the electric characteristic of SRAM soft failure in CMOS process. After taking electrical measurement, plain view SEM and cross-section TEM will reveal and understand the physical root cause of the electrical failure. After that, the principle of application for C-AFM on this SRAM soft failure analysis will be discussed.