Fast Wafer Level Reliability Monitoring (fWLR)

The demand on highly reliable products in combination with an increasing number of process steps in state of the art technologies drives the requirement to monitor the process reliability on a regular basis. In this tutorial an introduction to the field of fast Wafer Level Reliability (fWLR) Monitoring is presented. Various areas of the fWLR methodology are discussed: test structures, stress and measurement sequences, sample frequency and data analysis. This basic knowledge and the given references provide a good foundation for in detail studies and the set up or improvement of fWLR-systems.

Andreas Martin

Andreas Martin received his M.Eng.Sc. in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany, in 1992. He joined the silicon technology characterisation group of the National Microelectronics Research Centre (NMRC), Cork, Ireland in 1992 and worked on dielectric reliability assessment and reliability simulation. Since 1998 he works for the central Reliability Methodology department of Infineon Technologies AG in Munich, Germany in the field of fast productive WLR Monitoring. He is involved in advanced test structure design, development of new stress and measurement methodologies and data analysis techniques. He has published and co-authored numerous papers, given tutorials at conferences and served in the management and technical committees of the IEEE IRW, IEEE IRPS and of the Workshop on Dielectrics in Microelectronics (WoDiM) for many years. He is a senior member of the IEEE and an alternate of the JEDEC subcommittee 14.2.