Failure Modes Study of Active Area Damage with Two Identified Causes using Multi-Analysis Methods

AA (Active Area) is a very critical layer, it is related to the MOSFET devices operation. If the structure of the AA suffered damage, it will cause the device to operate abnormally. Generally speaking, AA damage issue is always a discussed phenomenon, but few people really explored the root cause in detail [1]. Because the root cause was unknown, we were unable to perform an effective improvement on the abnormality. In this paper, we provide two identified causes for AA damage. One is abnormal CoSi2, the other is metal lines circuit short. We successfully used multi-analyses methods to identify root cause and to improve yield in mass production. Relative physical mechanisms and physical analyses are described in this paper.