doi: 10.3850/978-3-9815370-4-8_0269


Dictionary-Based Sparse Representation for Resolution Improvement in Laser Voltage Imaging of CMOS Integrated Circuits


T. Berkin Cilingiroglu1, Mahmoud Zangeneh1, Aydan Uyar1, W. Clem Karl1, Janusz Konrad1, Ajay Joshi1, Bennett B. Goldberg2 and M. Selim Unlu1

1Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215, USA

2Department of Physics, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215, USA

ABSTRACT

The rapid decrease in the dimensions of integrated circuits with a simultaneous increase in component density have introduced resolution challenges for optical failure analysis techniques. Although optical microscopy efforts continue to increase resolution of optical systems through hardware modifications, signal processing methods are essential to complement these efforts to meet the resolution requirements for the nanoscale integrated circuit technologies. In this work, we focus on laser voltage imaging as the optical failure analysis technique and show how an overcomplete dictionary-based sparse representation can improve resolution and localization accuracy. We describe a reconstruction approach based on this sparse representation and validate its performance on simulated data. We achieve an 80% reduction of the localization error.



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