ElectroStatic Discharge (ESD) testing of integrated circuits subjects circuit elements to very high currents for short periods of time. A modified Transmission Line Pulse (TLP) measurement system for characterizing transistors and other circuit elements under high currents for ESD performance prediction and understanding is presented which can both stress devices and measure leakage. For the TLP system to yield useful information test structures are needed which vary the important design parameters for the circuit elements. Guidelines for transistor test structure design for use with the system are presented and demonstrated for PMOS transistors.

The objective, when mapping a wafer, is to capture the the full variation across the wafer while minimising the number of measurements. This is a very similar objective to that of experimental design and this paper applies classical Design Of Experiment (DOE) techniques to the selection of measurement points for wafer mapping. The resulting measurements are then fitted using Response Surface Methodology (RSM) from which contour plots or wafer maps can be generated. The accuracy of the fit can be ascertained by inspection of the adjusted R2 value and it is demonstrated that in many cases transformations can be used to improve the accuracy of the resulting wafer maps.