Introduction to Integrated Circuit Reliability

Reliability is one of the most important, and most challenging, requirements of integrated circuits (ICs). This tutorial presents an introduction of the reliability of CMOS Integrated Circuits. The tutorial starts by considering what is reliability and how it is described qualitatively (bathtub curve) and quantitatively. The tutorial next looks at the basic issues of reliability engineering: dealing with variability and using accelerated testing. The tutorial continues with an overview of the major failure mechanisms of CMOS ICs (TDDB, hot carrier, NBTI, electromigration, voiding, single event effects). With this foundation in place the tutorial considers reliability programs, contrasting testing-in reliability with building-in reliability. The tutorial concludes with considering how reliability is evolving as we move farther into the deep submicron region. Sample slides from the tutorial are available at
http://www.quickstartmicro.com/irps.htm.

Ted Dellin

Dr. Ted Dellin has over 25 years experience in microelectronics, microsystems and reliability. He leads the development of the reliability section of the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, is the Chief Scientist Emeritus of the Microsystems Center at Sandia National Laboratories and is a member of the Reliability Council at Sematech. For the last 3 years he has given the "Reinventing CMOS to Stay on Moore's Law" tutorial at IRPS. Dr. Dellin founded Quick Start Micro Training LLC and teaches public and private courses in Semiconductor Devices with Optoelectronics, Submicron CMOS, Semiconductor Technologies with MEMs and IC Reliability (which is the basis of this tutorial).