Introduction to the Special Issue on the 50th International Reliability Physics Symposium

On April 15-19, 2012, the 50th Annual IEEE International Reliability Physics Symposium was held in Garden Grove, CA, USA, commemorating a significant milestone for IRPS as the preeminent conference in the area of microelectronics reliability. The technical program included 29 invited talks, in addition to 75 contributed talks and 70 posters, and was witnessed by 408 attendees. Unique to this conference, all prior 49 years of symposium materials were shared with the attendees in a newly digitized format. The papers at The Symposium showcased a range topics, covering fundamental reliability of transistors, interconnects, back-end dielectrics, and packaging. State-of-the-art developments in reliability of memory devices, circuits (including but not limited to BTI, ESD, and latchup and soft errors), product qualification, failure analysis, process and integration impact on reliability, compound semiconductors, high voltage, and thin-film devices used in commercial, industrial, and harsh or unusual environmental conditions were shown. Applications of reliability assessment pertinent to those found in space, automobiles, renewable energy sources, and medical applications were also highlighted. While it is difficult to properly sample such a wide variety of technical contents, this Special Issue features four extended papers based on the original Symposium submission. In each case, the impact of intrinsic reliability failure mechanism(s) on device or circuit reliability is described, topics that should be of ongoing and lasting interest to the reliability community. An overview of the technical articles is given.