In-Depth Electrical Analysis to Reveal the Failure Mechanisms With Nanoprobing

Recent advances in nanorobotic manipulation inside scanning electron microscopes

“…Some notable achievements are mechanical and electrical characterization of graphene membranes 28,45 , electrical measurement of single transistors 27 , 3D transfer of graphene 28,45 , assembly of photonic crystal devices 1,187 , identification of the size effect on the mechanical properties of nanowires and the strain effect on the piezoresistive properties of nanowires 51,162 , discovery of new gene loci associated with promyelocytic nuclear bodies 37 , and tracing of neuronal networks and synaptic connections 182,183 . The formation of hybrid systems by integrating other instruments into an SEM has also produced unique capabilities.…”

“…For the electrical characterization of graphene, an L-shaped four-point probe was fabricated using FIB and controlled to probe a graphene film 28 , as shown in Figure 4h. Nanoprobing Nanorobotic manipulation inside SEM C Shi et al inside SEM was also employed to attain I-V data of single transistors on IC chips by Kleindiek Nanotechnik (refer to Figure 4i), for identifying faulty locations and understanding failure mechanisms 27 .…”

“…Nanomanipulation is capable of automated positioning of nanoprobes on nanostructures to perform electrical characterization for fault analysis and quality control. Automated nanoprobing was performed to probe nanostructures on SEM metrology chips, as shown in Figures 7a and b. Algorithms were developed on a GPU to realize real-time SEM image denoising and drift compensation, which enable robust visual tracking and visual servo control for automated nanoprobing 26,27 . Automated four-point probe measurements on single nanowires were also performed for electrical characterization 30 , as shown in Figure 7c, where four tungsten nanoprobes were moved downward to contact the substrate via a vision-based contactdetection method 72 and subsequently moved upward to a certain height above the substrate.…”

“…Recently, nanorobotic manipulation platforms with multiple degrees of freedom (DOFs) and piezoelectric actuators have been constructed inside SEMs for manipulating nanoscaled objects with nanometer resolution, which enables the realization of complicated tasks that range from mechanical tensile testing and electrical probing of nanomaterials [26][27][28][29][30] , electronic and photonic device prototyping 1,22,31 , NEMS assembly [31][32][33][34] , biological cell characterization and manipulation 3,35,36 and subcellular organelle extraction 35,37 . State-of-the-art SEM-based nanomanipulation systems are also integrated with AFMs and focused ion beam (FIB) systems, as well as various tools 38 and exchangeable toolboxes 39 .…”

“…The atomic defects produce electron localizations in isolated nanowires, and interwire coupling stabilizes the structure and promotes the metallic states in wire bundles 180 . For IC testing at the transistor level, electrical characterization by nanoprobing inside an SEM was performed to evaluate SRAM cells for failure analyses, which revealed the root causes and failure mechanisms 27 and contributed to the packaging and IC-MEMS integration 181 . Intracellular dissection via nanomanipulation inside an SEM extracted target DNA from a single-cell nucleus to discover gene associations with nuclear bodies 37 .…”