Research on failure modes and mechanisms of integrated circuits

Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) approach based on Physics-of-Failure (POF) builds a close relationship between the reliability and physical structure of products. It enables the assessment and prediction of reliability under actual loading conditions and helps to solve the underlying reliability design problems of electronic products, thus how to identify the failure modes and failure mechanisms become the key technique in PHM approach. Integrated circuit (IC) is the core component in electronic products which play very important roles to the performance of electronic equipment and system. With the fast development in IC industry, the scale of IC chip becomes larger, the dimension becomes smaller, and the failure mechanism becomes more complicated. Firstly the resent development of research on failure modes of integrated circuits were summarized, then different types of failure mechanisms such as electromigration, oxide dielectric breakdown, hot carrier aging were discussed, the corresponding relationship between the failure mode, failure mechanisms and the IC were build here, at last problems on the research were analyzed and suggestions for future investigations were also made.