The Boeing Company

Modern electronics typically consist of microprocessors and other complex integrated circuits (ICs) such as FPGAs, ADCs, and memory. They are susceptible to electrical, mechanical and thermal modes of failure like other components on a printed circuit board, but due to their materials, complexity and roles within a circuit, accurately predicting a failure rate has become difficult, if not impossible. Development of these critical components has conformed to Moore's Law, where the number of transistors on a die doubles approximately every two years. This trend has been successfully followed over the last four decades through reduction in transistor sizes creating faster, smaller ICs with greatly reduced power dissipation. Although this is great news for developers and users of high performance equipment, including consumer products and analytical instrumentation, a crucial, yet underlying reliability risk has emerged. Semiconductor failure mechanisms, which are far worse at these minute feature sizes (tens of nanometers), result in higher failure rates, shorter device lifetimes and unanticipated early device wearout. This is of special concern to users whose requirements include long service lifetimes and rugged environmental conditions, such as aerospace, defense, and other high performance (ADHP) industries. To that end, the Aerospace Vehicle Systems Institute (AVSI) has conducted research in this area, and DfR Solutions has performed much of the work as a contractor to AVSI. Physics-of-Failure (PoF) knowledge and an accurate mathematical approach which utilizes semiconductor formulae, industr