Tutorial and year in review program: TU1-1: Introduction to reliability physics and engineering

All materials and devices tend to degrade with time. For this reason, reliability physics is of great theoretical and practical importance. Reliability investigations generally start with measuring the degradation rate for a material/device under stress and then a modeling of the time-to-failure versus the applied stress. The term stress, as used here, is very general: stress will refer to any external agent (electrical, mechanical, chemical, thermal, electrochemical, etc.) that is capable of producing material/device degradation. Time-to-failure occurs when the amount of degradation reaches some critical threshold level. Since devices often require different levels of degradation to induce failure, time-to-failure becomes statistical in nature and two common failure distributions are discussed: Weibull and Lognormal. Time-to-failure (TF) modeling generally assumes either a power law or exponential stress-dependence with either an Arrhenius or Eyring-like activation energy. From these TF models, acceleration factors can be deduced and these tend to serve as the foundation for accelerated testing. During this presentation, several semiconductor failure mechanisms will be reviewed: Electromigration (EM), Stress Migration (SM), Time-Dependent Dielectric Breakdown (TDDB), Hot-Carrier Injection (HCI), Negative-Biased Temperature Instability (NBTI), Plasma-Induced Damage (PID), Single-Event Upsets (SEU), Surface Inversion, Thermal Cycling Fatigue, and Corrosion. This tutorial should provide the attendee with a solid foundation for a better understanding of the papers presented at the IRPS.