Recent trends in reliability assessment of advanced CMOS technologies

It is demonstrated that by applying the classical way of reliability lifetime prediction, the reliability of a product can no longer be guaranteed in some cases and for some failure mechanisms for the most advanced CMOS technologies. As a result, the reliability engineers started to rethink the classical reliability assessment methodology. Some elements of such a new assessment methodology are illustrated by a case study of oxide breakdown as failure mechanism. This will, however, require more interaction between technology, reliability and design engineers, in order to define realistic failure specifications and new chip failure criteria for each type of circuit.