Nanoprobing System

Nanoprobing lands physical electrical probes directly onto individual nanoscale device features — a single transistor's gate, source, or drain — inside a failure-analysis lab to measure electrical characteristics at exactly the location where a defect is suspected, something no non-contact imaging or spectroscopy technique can do on its own.

Nanoprobing is almost always the last step in a failure-analysis sequence, not the first, because reaching a specific transistor's node usually requires physically exposing it first. A target transistor is normally buried under multiple interconnect layers, so nanoprobing typically follows FIB milling that exposes the specific node of interest — emission microscopy or electrical fault localization narrows down roughly where the problem is first, FIB then opens physical access to that exact node, and only then does nanoprobing make direct electrical contact to confirm what's actually wrong at that precise location.

It's performed inside an SEM chamber precisely because positioning a physical probe tip onto a nanoscale feature by eye or with conventional optics simply isn't accurate enough. Modern transistor features are far smaller than optical microscopy can resolve clearly enough to guide precise probe placement; conducting nanoprobing inside an SEM lets the operator watch the probe tip approach and land on the exact target feature under live electron-beam imaging, which is the only practical way to achieve the positioning accuracy a successful nanoscale electrical contact requires.

Nanoprobing closes the loop that imaging and spectroscopy techniques can't close on their own — confirming, with an actual direct electrical measurement, whether a suspected defect site really is electrically broken the way the rest of the failure-analysis workflow pointed to, rather than leaving the diagnosis as an inference from indirect imaging alone.