Picosecond Imaging Circuit Analysis of Leakage Currents in CMOS Circuits

The light emission from ever increasing OFF-state leakage currents in advanced CMOS technologies can now be reliably measured using existing photon detectors. The measurements of such an emission provide valuable information about the operation of ICs. In this paper we suggest and experimentally confirm two new techniques based on such measurements - Transient Logic State Detection and Power Supply Noise Analysis.