Quality control for ICs: Manufacturing methods and screening procedures that are good enough today will have to be improved dramatically for the next generation of ICs

Although ICs today are highly reliable-their failure rates are as low as 3 per billion part-hours for TTL circuits, and 320 for a 5-volt microcomputer-far higher reliability will be required for the more complex very large-scale-integration devices the manufacturers will introduce in the late 1980s. The higher reliability can only be achieved, however, through new manufacturing methods and total commitment of top management to more rigorous quality assurance programs. Future devices will require ICs with failure rates no higher than 0.1 to 1 failure per billion part-hours.