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Tiny circuit design reliability issue related to competitive signal was investigated in a sense amplifier (SA) circuitry of SRAM by E-Beam probing technique in this paper. The irregular output signals then traced back to former stage circuit and identified associated waveforms. With such design concept and technique tracing, the invisible and cunning circuit mismatch reliability issue could be revealed successfully.

Highly-integrated radio frequency and mixed-mode devices that are manufactured in deep-submicron or more advanced CMOS processes are becoming more complex to analyze. The increased complexity presents us with many eccentric failure mechanisms that are uniquely different from traditional failure mechanisms found during failure analysis on digital logic applications. This paper presents a novel methodology to overcome the difficulties and discusses two case studies which demonstrate the application of the methodology. Through the case studies, the methodology was proven to be a successful approach. It is also proved how this methodology would work for such non-recognizable failures.