In this paper, we have proposed a new approach for optical failure analysis which employs a CMOS photon-emitting circuitry, consisting of a flip-flop based on a sense amplifier and a photon-emitting device. This method can be used even with deep-submicron processes where conventional optical failure analyses are difficult to use due to the low sensitivity in the near infrared (NIR) region of the spectrum. The effectiveness of our approach has been proved by the failure analysis of a prototype designed and fabricated in 0.18 ${mu}m$ CMOS process.