Enhancing Soft Defect Localization with Software Automated Intelligent Laser Scanning (SAILS)

Abstract Soft defect localization (SDL) is a fault isolation (FI) technique used to root cause device marginalities and/or defects. The variety of test modes and their marginalities that can be solved with SDL is increasing as we find new ways to utilize this technique to our needs. However, SDL analysis can be time consuming if the test times are slow since millions of test executions are needed to get a statistically significant result. To solve this problem, we propose an improvement named software automated intelligent laser scanning (SAILS) to modulate laser dwell time on the fly. This software and hardware implementation can be applied to any test method, now or in the future, and to any of the SDL tools available in the market. In this paper, we discuss the successful implementation of this approach and show its ability to judiciously mask out sites in real-time and use this mask to modulate laser dwell time.