Designing and building-in reliability in advanced microelectronic assemblies and structures

New technologies in electronics require that product development embrace the paradigms of design for reliability and built-in reliability. These paradigms require effective measures to create robust designs and manufacturing processes. This objective must be achieved through modeling failure processes and taking proactive steps early in the development. Following an assessment of material properties, finite element models are built of key structures in the system. A statistical experimental design is then developed. This statistically designed "virtual experiment" will include the geometrical and materials' variables comprising the system and a damage model, such as a fatigue prediction model. Information for process development or improvement is derived from the virtual experiment. The statistical model is then embedded in a Monte Carlo simulation to assess the impact of uncertainty and variability. This process of stochastic physics of failure is the subject of this paper. The process will be described and an application of this systems engineering based approach to micro-via interconnect reliability, in a complex multichip module (MCM), will be presented.