Spatial statistics for micro/nanoelectronics and materials science

Spatial statistics is a specialized branch of statistics aimed to provide information about the locations of randomly distributed objects in 1, 2 or 3 dimensions. The analysis involves data exploration, parameter estimation, model fitting and hypothesis formulation. In particular, in this work, we present some recent advances in the characterization of the spatial distribution of breakdown spots over the gate electrode of Metal-Insulator-Semiconductor and Metal-Insulator-Metal structures. The spots are regarded as a two-dimensional point pattern, which is analyzed using intensity plots, spatial counting methods, inter-event distance histograms and functional summary estimators. The methods reported here are general so that they can be applied to many different research fields.