Identification of Failure Modes for Circuit Samples with Confounded Causes of Failure

Shu-Han Hsu, Ying-Yuan Huang, Kexin Yang, Linda Milor

Abstract: Circuits may fail in the field due to a wide variety of failure modes. If there are frequent failures in the field, circuits are returned to the manufacturer, and the causes of failure must be identified. The challenge is that wearout mechanisms are confounded in circuit and system-level failure data. Using such failure data, it is often hard to separate the underlying failure causes without time-consuming and expensive physical failure analysis. To distinguish the wearout mechanisms for each failure sample, we have developed a quick and low-cost methodology using maximum likelihood estimation and probability analysis to determine the origin of the failure distributions, region of error, and sorting accuracy. We apply our methodology to analyze the competing wearout mechanisms in 14nm FinFET ring oscillators, as an example, using simulation. We also consider the problem of Trojan detection.