Invited tutorial: The classical/emerging reliability considerations of semiconductor devices

As the CMOS technology approaches the fundamental scaling limits and the functional integration of multiple components (e.g., NEMS, biosensors, ferroelectric/polymer capacitors, etc.) onto the CMOS fabric suggests remarkable potential for More-than-Moore technologies, the landscape of reliability considerations are evolving rapidly for the semiconductor industry. In this tutorial talk, I will discuss four classical and emerging reliability issues to provide a snapshot of the emerging trends in the field: (1) Stochastic variability is becoming an important consideration of classical reliability issues such as NBTI and PBTI, just as it did for dielectric breakdown almost two decades ago; (2) Self-heating and thermal-cross talk of surround-gate technologies such as FinFET suggests thermal management as a new/emerging reliability concern; (3) the hot atom damage is being understood as a universal reliability concern for all logic/memory technologies that rely on movement of the central atom in a dual well Landau energy landscape (e.g. Ferroelectric, Piezoelectric, phase-change devices), and (4) stability of CMOS-based biosensors in fluid environment will continue to define the potential for integration onto a mobile platform. I will show that once the basic physics of the classical and emerging reliability issues are understood, there are intuitively obvious approaches to address them within an end-to-end hierarchical IC design framework.