Implementation of FWLR for process reliability monitoring

In Chartered, process reliability monitoring (PRM) begins after a new technology is qualified, aims at ensuring specific reliability goals are met and detecting reliability degradation due to process drift/changes and in-line issues. PRM data is provided to customer on a regular basis. Traditional PRM programs (package level stress) are expensive and time consuming, while very short test time of FWLR (Fast Wafer Level Reliability) offers a practical technique of providing quick intrinsic reliability information to process engineers. FWLR is defined as highly accelerated stress, specific to a particular failure mechanism, to measure rate of degradation of material. When correlation with traditional more moderate stress is established, FWLR can also be used for lifetime extrapolation purpose. This paper describes the implementation of FWLR to monitor intrinsic process reliability performance.