Nanoscale reliability assessment of electronic devices

As a result of the continuous reduction of feature sizes in electronic devices, reliability issues have to be treated with an accordingly high spatial resolution inducing the need for nanoscale measuring techniques. The use of scanning probe microscope based methods allows to determine thermal, mechanical, electrical, electronic, optical and optoelectronic properties as well as the localization of failures and the access to device internal waveforms. As all methods are based on standard scanning force microscopes, an introduction into this technique in general is followed by a description of important specialized methods. Applications of these techniques cover a wide range of semiconducting devices from silicon integrated devices (ULSI), III-V-compound devices for very high frequencies, optoelectronic components and power devices.