Low-voltage EBIC investigation of fails

An investigation of shorting defects in SRAM structures by means of low-voltage EBIC is presented and the location of the defect was compared to the one isolated with EBIRCH. A pulldown device in 7 nm technology was intentionally overstressed, and the shorting location isolated with EBIRCH at 500 V. Then a series of EBIC investigations at very low voltage were undertaken in an experiment to isolate the problem. It was determined that some information about the nature of the defect was clear at beam landing energies as low as 150 eV.