Characterizing infant mortality in high volume manufacturing

Abstract

Due to the large sample sizes required, certain reliability modeling parameters for infant mortality cannot be measured during technology development with desired confidence levels by engineering experiments. Among these reliability modeling parameters is thermal energy activation (Ea). Ea is used in the Arrhenius equation to calculate the burn-in time for integrated circuits. A small change in this parameter can have a great impact in burn-in time. In this work we have measured this parameter in high volume manufacturing (HVM) in 65 nm technology using naturally occurring data by applying novel new techniques at virtually no cost.