This is just an Excerpt from a larger document, click here to view the entire document. Introduction

Microelectronics integration density is limited by the reliability of the manufactured product at a desired circuit density. Design rules, operating voltage and maximum switching speeds are chosen to insure func tional operation over the intended lifetime of the product. In order to determine the ultimate performance for a given set of design constraints, the reliability must be modeled for its specific operating condition. Thus, Reliability modeling for the purpose of lifetime prediction is the ultimate task of a failure physics evaluation. Unfortunately, all the industrial approaches to reliability evaluation fall short of predicting failure rates or wear-out lifetime of semiconductor products. This is attributed mainly to two reasons; the lack of a unified approach for predicting device failure rates and the fact that all commercial reliability evaluation methods rely on the acceleration of one, dominant, failure mechanism.

Over the past several decades, our knowledge about the root cause and physical behavior of the critical failure mechanisms in microelectronic devices has grown significantly. Confidence in the reliability models have lead to more aggressive design rules that have been successfully applied to the latest VLSI technology. One result of improved reliability modeling has been accelerated performance, beyond the expectation of Moore's Law. A consequence of more aggressive design rules has been a reduction in the weight of a single failure mechanism. Hence in modern devices, there is no single failure mode that is more likely to occur than any other as guaranteed by the integration of modern failure physics and modern simulation tools in the design process. The consequence of more advanced reliability modeling tools is a new phenomenon of device failures resulting from a combination of several competing failure mechanism.

Today, reliability device simulators have become an integral part of the design process. These simulators successfully model the most significant physical failure mechanisms in modern electronic devices, such as Time Dependent Dielectric Breakdown (TDDB), Negative Bias Temperature Instability (NBTI), Electromigration (EM) and Hot Carrier Injection (HCI). These mechanisms are modeled throughout the circuit design process so that the system will operate for a minimum expected useful life. Modern chips are composed of tens or hundreds of millions of transistors. Hence, chip level reliability prediction methods are mostly statistical. Reliability prediction tools, now model the failure probability of chips at the end of life by analyzing only the single dominant wearout mechanism. Modern prediction tools do not predict the random, post burn-in, failure rate that would be seen in the field.

Chip and packaged system reliability is still measured by failure rate in FIT. The FIT is a unit, defined as one failure per billion part hours. The semiconductor industry provides an expected FIT for every product that is sold based on operation within the specified conditions of voltage, frequency, heat dissipation and etc. Hence, a system reliability model is a prediction of the expected mean time between failures (MTBF) for an entire system as the reciprocal of the sum of the FIT rates for every component. The failure rate of a component can be defined in terms of an acceleration factor, AF, as (Equation 1):


where "Number of failures" and "Number of tested" are the number of actual failures that occurred as a fraction of the total number of units subjected to an accelerated test. The acceleration factor, AF, must be supplied by the manufacturer since only they know the failure mechanisms that are being accelerated in the High Temperature Operating Life (HTOL) and it is generally based on a company proprietary variant of the MIL-HDBK-217 approach for accelerated life testing. The true task of reliability modeling, therefore, is to choose an appropriate value for AF based on the physics of the dominant failure mechanisms that would occur in the field for the device.

The HTOL qualification test is usually performed as the final qualification step of a semiconductor manufacturing process. The test consists of stressing some number of parts, usually about 100, for an extended time, usually 1000 hours, at an accelerated voltage and temperature. Two features shed doubt on the accuracy of this procedure. One feature is lack of sufficient statistical data and the second is that companies generally present zero-failure results for their qualification tests. Parts are stressed at relatively low levels to guarantee zero failures during qualification testing in accordance with their guidelines. Zero failures results in zero real data and the true statistical confidence is mathematically imaginary. The assumption, then, is that no more than one failure occurred during the accelerated test and substitute 1/2 failure to circumvent this imaginary confidence dillema. This results, based on our example parameters, in a reported FIT = 5000/AF, which can be almost any value from less than 1 FIT to more than 500 FIT, depending on the conditions and model used for the voltage and temperature acceleration.

The accepted approach for measuring FIT would, in theory, be reasonably appropriate if there is only a single dominant failure mechanism that is excited equally by either voltage or temperature. For example, EM is known to follow Black's equation (described later) and is accelerated by increased stress current in a wire or by increased temperature of the device. If, however, multiple failure mechanisms are responsible for device failures, each failure mechanism should be modeled as an individual "element" in the system and the component survival is modelled as the survival probability of all the "elements" as a function of time.

If multiple failure mechanisms, instead of a single mechanism, are assumed to be time-independent and independent of each other, FIT (constant failure rate approximation) should be a reasonable approximation for realistic field failures. Under the assumption of multiple failure mechanisms, each will be accelerated differently depending on the physics that is responsible for each mechanism. If, however, an HTOL test is performed at an arbitrary voltage and temperature for acceleration based only on a single failure mechanism, then only that mechanism will be accelerated. In that instance, which is generally true for most devices, the reported FIT (especially one based on zero failures) will be meaningless with respect to other failure mechanisms.