Microelectronics Reliability: Physics-of-failure Based Modeling And Lifetime Evaluation

National Aeronautics and Space Administration Microelectronics Reliability: Physics-of-Failure Based Modeling and Lifetime Evaluation Mark White Jet Propulsion Laboratory Pasadena, California Joseph B. Bernstein University of Maryland College Park, Maryland Jet Propulsion Laboratory California Institute of Technology Pasadena, California JPL Publication 08-5 2/08 National Aeronautics and Space Administration Microelectronics Reliability: Physics-of-Failure Based Modeling and Lifetime Evaluation NASA Electronic Parts and Packaging (NEPP) Program Office of Safety and Mission Assurance Mark White Jet Propulsion Laboratory Pasadena, California Joseph B. Bernstein University of Maryland College Park, Maryland NASA WBS: 939904.01.11.10 JPL Project Number: 102197 Task Number: 1.18.5 Jet Propulsion Laboratory 4800 Oak Grove Drive Pasadena, CA 91109 http://nepp.nasa.gov This research was primarily carried out at the University of Maryland under the direction of Professor Joseph B. Bernstein and was sponsored in part by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Electronic Parts and Packaging (NEPP) Program, the Aerospace Vehicle Systems Institute (AVSI) Consortium—specifically, AVSI Project #17: Methods to Account for Accelerated Semiconductor Wearout—and the Office of Naval Research. Reference herein to any specific commercial product, process, or service by trade name, trademark, manufacturer, or otherwise, does not constitute or imply its endorsement by the United States Government or the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology. Copyright 2008. All rights reserved. ii PREFACE The solid-state electronics industry faces relentless pressure to improve performance, increase functionality, decrease costs, and reduce design and development time. As a result, device feature sizes are now in the nanometer scale range and design life cycles have decreased to fewer than five years. Until recently, semiconductor device lifetimes could be measured in decades, which was essentially infinite with respect to their required service lives. It was, therefore, not critical to quantify the device lifetimes exactly, or even to understand them completely. For avionics, medical, military, and even telecommunications applications, it was reasonable to assume that all devices would have constant and relatively low failure rates throughout the life of the system; this assumption was built into the design, as well as reliability and safety analysis processes. Technological pressures on the electronics industry to reduce transitor size and decrease cost while increasing transitor count per chip, however, runs counter to the needs of most highreliability applications where long life with exceptional reliability is critical. As design rules have become tighter, power consumption has increased and voltage margins have become almost nonexistent for the designed performance level. In achieving the desired performance levels, the lifetime of most commercial parts is the ultimate casualty. Most large systems are built with the assumption that electronic components will last for decades without failure. However, counter to this assumption, device reliability physics is becoming so well understood that manufacturing foundries are designing microcircuits for a three- to seven-year useful life, as that is what most of the industry seeks. The military, aerospace, medical, and especially the telecommunications industries ca