New Materials - New Reliability Issues

Semiconductor device reliability can generally be broken into two parts: infant mortality failures and wearout mechanisms. Infant mortality failures are due to manufacturing defects. The sources of these defects are generally the same as those that cause yield loss, so instrumentation requirements for detecting both are similar. Wearout failure mechanisms are known physical degradation mechanisms that will eventually cause the device to fail. For the reliability assurance engineer, the challenge is to ensure the degradation rate is slow enough to minimize the probability the device will fail within some specified ?useful lifetime.? Job #2143