Measuring Liftoff Quality and Reliability with Special Test Structures

This work attempts to bridge the gap between manufacturability, quality, and reliability. The investigation is focused specifically on early life failures – the ones that customers actually experience. Focus on defect type failures is necessary to improve reliability on any maturing process. This work supports the notion that quality is an integral part of device reliability. This research advances the knowledge of manufacturability by showing the importance of the relationship between clever layout of test structures, application of ramp stress voltages, finding resulting yield, conversion to quality per units of periphery, and reliability prediction to draw the focus back to what causes failures. Compound semiconductor manufacturing processes will typically utilize metallization patterning techniques calle