William R. Tonti
Technical Program Chair

Technical Program Chair's Welcome

The Technical Program will showcase 68 papers peer selected from the global micro-electronics community and will present the latest findings in reliability physics and engineering. Dr. Tak Ning of IBM Research will open the symposium with a keynote address titled, "Silicon Technology Directions in the New Millennium. "

This year the symposium will have world-renowned experts debate with the audience the following microelectronics issue: "Is technology scaling limited by oxide reliability". Please mark your calendar, bring your questions and don't miss out on this event.

Additionally the symposium will include our world class Monday tutorials program, which this year will feature 11 tutorials that provide in-depth presentations of important reliability issues. The Monday night workshops supplement the Technical Program and tutorials and provide an opportunity for informal, in-depth discussions in 10 topic areas. Please be sure to sign up for the workshops using the IRPS web page at http://www.irps.org/ws/.

As introduced last year, the Technical Program remains electronic. The initiative was well received by you the technical community, as over 75% of the total number of abstracts submitted were submitted electronically. Abstracts were received from all over the world and were reviewed by a team of 85 industry and academic experts in reliability engineering and physics. These committee members are all volunteers and their efforts in selecting very high quality papers for the symposium are to be commended. The Technical Program Committee is organized into sub-committees dealing with specific areas of reliability physics. This year's sub-committees focused on traditional favorites at the IRPS such as failure analysis, interconnects, device and process, ESD and latch-up, device dielectrics, and hot carrier aging, as well as newer areas of reliability concern involving plasma process induced damage, Copper/Low-K, and micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS), with a renewed emphasis on compound semiconductors. The compound semiconductor session includes an invited paper, introducing the reliability concerns associated with high field operation of Silicon Germanium Heterojunction Bipolar Transistors integrated in a high performance BICMOS technology.

The arrangement of paper sessions within the Technical Program reflects this sub-committee structure.

The Technical Program begins on Tuesday at 8:15 a.m. The following Dielectrics plenary session discusses the latest advances in the reliability physics of thin insulators, and includes an analysis of energy controlled time-to breakdown versus the traditional physics oxide field breakdown. The remainder of the Program has been organized to include sessions consciously arranged to minimize overlap between subject areas. The Tuesday afternoon parallel sessions cover Dielectrics II, Hot Carriers, MEM's and Device and Process I. Hot Carriers covers analytical models useful in the deep sub-micron regime, LDD degradation, analysis of worst case mosfet stress conditions, and width dependencies on HER reliability.

MEM's reliability is a growing field, and this year will topically cover actuators, shock and vibration, and characterization techniques.

The Wednesday morning parallel sessions begin with Device and Process II, and Packaging. Device and process I and II covers many exciting aspects of semiconductor reliability, including moisture effects, antifuse, flash, mosfet, yield correlation, SER susceptibility, metal anneal, Cu/Low-K, and oxide breakdown impact to mosfet operation. The packaging session discusses Analysis and simulation of BGA packages, Lifetime prediction for IGBT modules, stability of hall plates and the effect temperature cycling has on reliability prediction.

This session concludes with Compound Semiconductors, incorporating an invited SiGe paper, GaAs reliability, and optical fiber sensor reliability.

Wednesday afternoon has parallel sessions in ESD, which has the 1999 best ESREF paper describing ESD smart power reliability, and also includes discussions of protection using today's advanced dielectrics and metal systems. The parallel Interconnect session will contain interesting work on low-k inter level dielectrics, and copper interconnect integration issues.

Thursday reverts back to plenary sessions. The morning includes Process Induced Damage, which investigates various techniques and models to both detect and characterize damage using charge pumping, on-chip probes, and rapid ramp breakdown. The morning continues with the invited Dielectrics panel discussion, and attendee questions.

Thursday afternoon concludes IRPS 2000 with Failure Analysis where advances in defect based testing, novel probing techniques and process contributions to failures are discussed.

William R. Tonti
Technical Program Chair