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Dear All,

PVC has been used to detect leaky pn junctions under contacts. Some say that when the PVC contrast is abnormal, there is for sure a leakage; however, when PVC does not reveal abnormal contrast, there actually can also be a leakage. 

In short, PVC is very good at saying "Leakage!", but not so good at saying "No leakage.".

To make it more easily memorable, PVC is very good at saying "Bad", but not so good at saying "Good".

If this is consistent with your experience, could you share a published paper on the subject or its citation info?

Dear Wentao, here are some comments from my colleague Satish Kodali. Hope this helps.
Felix

PVC may not always provide the answers we need to identify fails. In advanced technology nodes we have soft fails which are voltage sensitive (which we can modulate the Fail from pass to fail depending on the test conditions employed). They are hard to be perceived by standard PVC methodologies. Advanced testing like nanoprobing is employed to characterize the fails. Please see the article below in the digital library.

Nanoprobe Characterization of Soft SRAM bit Fails in Advanced Technologies | ISTFA Proceedings | ASM Digital Library (asminternational.org)

Dear All,

PVC has been used to detect leaky pn junctions under contacts. Some say that when the PVC contrast is abnormal, there is for sure a leakage; however, when PVC does not reveal abnormal contrast, there actually can also be a leakage. 

In short, PVC is very good at saying "Leakage!", but not so good at saying "No leakage.".

To make it more easily memorable, PVC is very good at saying "Bad", but not so good at saying "Good".

If this is consistent with your experience, could you share a published paper on the subject or its citation info?