Abstract:
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.
Technological pressures on the electronics industry to reduce transitor size and decrease cost
while increasing transitor count per chip, however, runs counter to the needs of most highreliability
applications where long life with exceptional reliability is critical. As design rules have
become tighter, power consumption has increased and voltage margins have become almost nonexistent
for the designed performance level. In achieving the desired performance levels, the
lifetime of most commercial parts is the ultimate casualty. Most large systems are built with the
assumption that electronic components will last for decades without failure. However, counter to
this assumption, device reliability physics is becoming so well understood that manufacturing
foundries are designing microcircuits for a three- to seven-year useful life, as that is what most of
the industry seeks. The military, aerospace, medical, and especially the telecommunications
industries cannot afford to depend on custom parts for their most sophisticated circuit designs.
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