Zero defect manufacturing as a challenge for advanced failure analysis

In today's automotive business a lot of new features with safety relevance are added to the vehicles. Therefore customers require high quality and reliability. The semiconductor industry provides a major contribution to the increased performance and functionality of car electronics and needs to develop sophisticated strategies for quality learning and continuous improvement in order to meet the challenging expectations of customers towards zero defects. The goal is no longer to improve quality "just by improving yield" but to apply active quality learning by identifying, analyzing and understanding outliers of any distribution during the whole production and testing processes which would normally not be relevant for yield but are a potential risk for quality. Within this refined approach, traditional failure analysis - concentrating on non-functional chips - has to evolve. Due to this new challenge, advanced failure analysis has also to handle the variations to enable Zero Defect Manufacturing.