Building-in Reliability for VLSI

Building-in reliability (BIR) was introduced in the early of 1990's. It is a methodology to manufacture highly reliable IC by minimizing and eliminating the sources of product unreliability in the beginning of a new product process. The characteristic of integrated reliability about BIR diffuses the responsibility for reliability into the whole team, including not only the process/ reliability/ characterization engineers, but also the applied research engineers and the customers who use integrated circuits. It's well known that the quality and reliability are defined by the customer, not by the manufacturers. So the customer's role in BIR is very important, especially the responsibilities of establishing good communications with the manufacturer and returning all failures to the manufacturer. The quality function deployment (QFD) and qualified manufacturer's list (QML) can help the customer take his responsibilities. In addition, nowadays little progress has been made in charactering the reliability of the future high reliability of VLSI after using the BIR approach. Small-sample statistical theory, especially for support vector machines (SVM) will be attempted to assess the reliability of VLSI.