Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

ECE-1768: Reliability of Integrated Circuits

Specifics:

General Description:

Description of the techniques used to study the reliability of integrated circuits. Covers reliability modeling, physical causes of semiconductor device failure, reliability model development and calibration, model-based reliability prediction, reliability testing and measurement, and failure diagnosis. Coverage emphasizes application to integrated circuit technology.

Topical Outline:

  1. Introduction (3%): Includes an overview of integrated circuit technology.
  2. Review of probability theory (10%): Includes definition of probability, random variables, and joint statistics.
  3. Reliability mathematics (14%): A mathematical treatment of reliability, covering reliability functions and distribution functions. We will be mainly concerned with the systems approach to reliability theory.
  4. Reliability testing/measurements (31%): Cover reliability model development: how to measure and use experimental data in order to derive the distributions and parameters of the reliability models discussed earlier in order to do reliability prediction. Topics include aging trend identification, distribution identification, stress testing and accelerated testing.
  5. Failure mechanisms in integrated circuits (21%): A brief look at the variety of physical failure mechanisms in ICs, covering electrical stress, intrinsic failure mechanisms, and extrinsic failure mechanisms.
  6. Reliability prediction (7%): Brief presentation of the two basic approaches of prediction, namely failure rate methods (MIL-HDBK-217) and physics of failure methods.
  7. Industrial practice (14%): Testing and qualifying products, including burn-in, electrical stressing, failure analysis and building-in reliability.