Microelectronics Reliability: Physics-of-Failure Based Modeling and Lifetime Evaluation

The solid-state electronics industry faces relentless pressure to improve performance, increase functionality, decrease costs, and reduce design and development time. As a result, device feature sizes are now in the nanometer scale range and design life cycles have decreased to fewer than five years. Until recently, semiconductor device lifetimes could be measured in decades, which was essentially infinite with respect to their required service lives. It was, therefore, not critical to quantify the device lifetimes exactly, or even to understand them completely. For avionics, medical, military, and even telecommunications applications, it was reasonable to assume that all devices would have constant and relatively low failure rates throughout the life of the system; this assumption was built into the design, as well as reliability and safety analysis processes....