Abstract
X-ray tomography provides 3-D information of an integrated circuit (IC) and has been utilized for counterfeit detection. Although it is a nondestructive process, electrical functionalities of IC under long time radiation has yet to be fully investigated. This paper analyzes the impact of X-ray tomography on the reliability of ICs with different fabrication technologies. We perform a 3-D imaging on Intel flash memories, Macronix flash memories, Xilinx Spartan 3, and Spartan 6 FPGAs and test the electrical functionalities after each round of tomography. We examine the impact of tomography on erase time, read margin, and program operation in flash memories. The change of ring oscillators frequency mapped in FPGAs is also investigated. A major finding is that tomography increases the erase time of flash memory of older technology nodes, eventually resulting in failure. In contrast, the flash and Xilinx FPGAs of newer technologies seem much less sensitive to tomography, as only minor degradations are observed. Degradation of IC performance is explained by considering total ionization dose effect due to tomography. Counterfeit detection requires approximately 2 h of tomography and no IC failed permanently during this time period.
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