Investigation of Electrostatic Discharge-Induced Soft-Failure Using 3D Robotic Scanning

A robotic ESD scanning system is presented for scanning complex 3D objects. It provides pseudo-2D plots that illustrate the sensitive locations of the device under test on a relative scale. Using this system, we could determine the susceptible regions of the device. It was observed that disturbing different sensitive regions lead to different soft-failure types. Determining the sensitive locations of a complex-shaped DUT helps to identify the disturbed circuitry and verify the effect of countermeasures in a repeatable way.