Reliability Prediction for Microelectronics

JOSEPH B. BERNSTEIN, PHD, is Director of the Laboratory for Failure Analysis and Reliability of Electronic Systems at Ariel University, Israel. He has worked and published extensively on failure analysis and defect avoidance in microelectronics, and is a senior member of IEEE. ALAIN A. BENSOUSSAN, PHD, is a Consulting Reliability Engineer with decades of experience as an Expert on Optics and Opto-Electronics Parts at Thales Alenia Space. He has conducted research in many areas of microelectronics reliability and physics of failure. EMMANUEL BENDER, PHD, completed his PhD in Electrical and Electronics Engineering, specializing in Microelectronics Reliability, at Ariel University, Israel, in 2022.

Author Biography xiii

Series Foreword xv

Preface xix

Scope xxi

Introduction xxiii

1 Conventional Electronic System Reliability Prediction 1

1.1 Electronic Reliability Prediction Methods 2

1.2 Electronic Reliability in Manufacturing, Production, and Operations 27

1.3 Reliability Criteria 34

1.4 Reliability Testing 42

2 The Fundamentals of Failure 55

2.1 The Random Walk 56

2.2 Diffusion 61

2.3 Solutions for the Diffusion Equation 63

2.4 Drift 69

2.5 Statistical Mechanics 70

2.6 Chemical Potential 74

2.7 Thermal Activation Energy 77

2.8 Oxidation and Corrosion 81

2.9 Vibration 85

2.10 Summary 89

3 Physics-of-Failure-based Circuit Reliability 91

3.1 Problematic Areas 92

3.2 Reliability of Complex Systems 113

3.3 Physics-of-Failure-based Circuit Reliability Prediction Methodology 119

4 Transition State Theory 133

4.1 Stress-Related Failure Mechanisms 134

4.2 Non-Arrhenius Model Parameters 138

4.3 Physics of Healthy 171

5 Multiple Failure Mechanism in Reliability Prediction 179

5.1 MTOL Testing System 183

5.2 MTOL Matrix: A Use Case Application 191

5.3 Comparison of DSM Technologies (45, 28, and 20 nm) 200

5.4 16 nm FinFET Reliability Profile Using the MTOL Method 204

5.5 16 nm Microchip Health Monitoring (MHM) from MTOL Reliability 215

6 System Reliability 229

6.1 Definitions 230

6.2 Series Systems 232

6.3 Weibull Analysis of Data 241

6.4 Weibull Analysis to Correlate Process Variations and BTI Degradation 247

7 Device Failure Mechanism 255

7.1 Time-Dependent Dielectric Breakdown 257

7.2 Hot Carrier Injection 265

7.3 Negative Bias Temperature Instability 276

7.4 Electromigration 282

7.5 Soft Errors due to Memory Alpha Particles 285

8 Reliability Modeling of Electronic Packages 289

8.1 Failure Mechanisms of Electronic Packages 293

8.2 Failure Mechanisms’ Description and Models 297

8.3 Failure Models 310

8.4 Electromigration 315

8.5 Corrosion Failure 317

8.6.1 Creep 322

8.7 Reliability Prediction of Electronic Packages 325

8.8 Reliability Failure Models 325

References 331

Index 363